Whistle while you Work

Whistle, cough, yawn, sniff

A-hem, ahem, ahem, ahem ahem!

Nice weather,

At least it’s Friday

I’ve got Shepherd’s Pie for dinner

Whisper, whisper

Love you. Love you.

Would you like a bite of this?

Ring ring, ring, ring, ring ring, ring ring

Please hold. Please call back later.

Waa! Waa! Waa! Waaeeeeaaaa!

Its different when you have kids

Beep. Oi oi. Yes mate, yes mate.

How was you. In'it.

Yeah you?

Click, click. Tap tap.

Pat pat. Scratch scratch.

Yawwwnn. Oh dear! Oh my God.

Save the children! Big Issue?

Ten for a pound. Have a nice day!

Humm Humm. Doo de doo.

Whistle whistle whistle whistle.

Is it because we don't talk

That we make so much noise?

Okay okay, nothing to be taken too seriously here – I’m not taking poetry writing until next year, but I think it does beg a few questions nonetheless. Why, in a world where we have such a wealth of sounds and images to distract us, do we persist in indulging in inane activities such as whistling, or talking to ourselves. Are our minds not already satisfied enough by the other multitude of distractions on offer, and if not why not? Is there are reason why these activities still permeate our everyday expressions? And if there is, is it good enough to counterbalance the potential irritation they cause to other people?

Let me begin, if I can, with one trait very particular to me. Whistling. From the times in my childhood when my father insisted on engaging in producing these persistently piercing noises from his lips it has irritated and bemused me in equal measure. Why? Why does he have to make such an awful sound? What is the point? Is it heightening his enjoyment of the song, if it is even a song? Is it for enjoyment that he is doing it? If it isn’t, then why? And doesn’t he realise that no-one wants to listen?

I am not going to deal with the ethical implications of this as yet, but I do want to explore a little the reasons for making such a seemingly pointless noise in the first place.

Whistling is way to deal with uncomfortable situation. We started it as a child – in a situation where we scared or uncertain, we were taught to sing a happy song, or whistle to ourselves - and, as adults, we continue to do this. I notice it most when other men come into a public toilet or walk alone in an unfamiliar place.

Its simplicity is its keys – it prevents the mind forming complex thoughts about a potentially uncomfortable situation. The breathing is regulated, the heart rate maintained and the whistler can proceed without concern. To me it indicates a pathetic inability to deal with internal issues in an adult way, but I suppose it does work, temporarily at least. One must rationalize to solve a problem completely, but in England we don’t do that. Maybe that is why it’s a particular trait to us – the stiff upper lip mentality.

Unbelievably, I think some people also still whistle when they are bored. They want attention of some sort, and finding that they will not receive this automatically by sitting in silence, and lacking the social skills to engage with nearby others, they repeat a simple song in their heads, and display a skill in being able to replay it out loud. They feel please with themselves and expect others to feel the same. Whistling is happy isn't it?

Finally, people whistle because it helps them to concentrate. Again, this seems unbelievably infantile to me - akin to sucking your thumb or licking your lips when trying to write, but I still see people doing it when looking at a screen of numbers or squinting at a book.

But why whistling? Why haven’t we evolved beyond this? Surely the process of replicating a song in our heads as a multitude of far superior synthetic equivalents in the modern day?

Yes, this may be true, but the simple fact is that these other, modern external sources do not work in the same way. The Walkman, the I-Pod, Spotify, TV, etc do not to regulate our minds, rather than overstimulate it.

We do not watch 3d football matches, or put on the latest Lady Gaga tune to help us concentrate on our Sudoku puzzle or to piss in the urinal. We do it to be distracted. Okay, it may replace the boredom we feel in some circumstances, but at the same time it makes us more bored in other situations. This is the reason why the plague of unnecessary noises is most prevalent at work. Minds that are so used to being distracted need to find an outlet for their fix – there is no Come Dine with Me, or Facebook or Champions League Live here , so they must do something. Work environments are notoriously mind-numbing, with many people sitting, waiting for the hours to end pretending to do work, and we are spoilt with distractions outside of work, so find it difficult to transfer to the hardships of blank desks and screens of meaningless databases. We desperately want more, but cannot have, and so again, we regulate our minds with other things – tap tap tap, scratch scratch, whistle, whistle. Our skills at self-amusement are not good without the tools we need to do this – Nintendos, laptops, I Phones et al.

Now the key to evolving out of the unnecessary noise quagmire is to be able to deal with our inadequacies, or boredom, or capacity to concentrate internally. To be able to think to ourselves - to consider, wonder and rationalise. Indeed one might suggest that this would make us far superior human beings to the thoughtless consumers we are at the moment, but...well, this wouldn't be much good for the world we live in now would it? If we could solve all our problems without the need for beer, coffee, clothes, cakes - then we wouldn't be much use to the markets that govern our world now would we?

It’s a clever system. The duller jobs become the more desperate we are to consume, and because of the jobs we do - software engineer, IT support, mobile phone salesman - the more available and efficient the items have become. And let’s face it, there’s only so much a good session of whistling can do, particularly to a thoughtless consumer of goods. At the end we are being like the baby in the pushchair, annoying everyone in the supermarket isle.

‘I want my DS. I want my X-Men 3. Waa. Waaa.’

It has reached the point where we are scared of silence, of not having at least some modicum of stimulation, and whistling is a good outlet for this - it takes us instantly back to a song - probably a catchy pop song - and this inexorably to the culture we know and love and feel comfortable in.

The more stupid we are, the less creative we are in distracting our minds and the louder the noise becomes.

There are similar reasons for why we make other banal noises - such as the completely asinine conversation - 'I'm having fish fingers for dinner tonight. What are you having?'

Is this it? Is this the best thing you have to talk about?

In a self-obsessed world you would have thought simple suggestion would be that we be desperate to communicate all the details of our amazingly interesting selves to all and sundry, but in my experience this is not the case. If anything our regression into online profiles and e-communication has meant that we find it very hard to talk about anything interesting or true in our everyday lives. Our jobs are fundamentally meaningless, relationships are something of a passé embarrassment and our leisure time is all about developing ourselves - picking up that girl, having the greatest night out, or getting to a new section of that incredible game - and either way it is very unlikely that we will share a common interest with our fellow man, nor would we want to - we'd hardly be special if we did and we all think we're special, don’t we? For this reason then, we only deign ourselves to communicate with the lesser others in the most rudimentary way possible - what are you having for dinner tonight? What are you up to this weekend? How’s the weather where you are? - We don’t care about the answer, but you know - we're bored. We can't whistle for the whole afternoon. It’s the same with inane jokes or football - we get to converse without really talking about anything and we keep our special selves under wraps. Again, the lesser the intellect, the more this conversation prevails. The smarter the individual, the greater the ego, the greater the self-obsession, the lesser the necessity to communicate, but also the greater ability to make talking about nothing seem important.

Conversation has become one big game to talk without talking about each other as much as possible. We find silence difficult because we are not used to internal thoughts, so we want to talk about something, but we cannot talk about much of what we do and we want to remain special. Hence the inanity of it all.

The problem also exists with couples. They now only seem to be able to communicate with each other in childish platitudes and whispers, so incapable are they of expressing their emotions in a confident, adult manner. Love isn’t an acceptable subject to discuss in public once you have passed the latter teenage years, and so we feel we must regress into pre-adolescence so it can never be taken too seriously. Work, progress, success. That is what being an adult is all about, and this is how relationships must be viewed as well. They must be suitable, they must work.

The battle for overstimulation, and the removal of ‘pointless’ emotion and thought, mans that the clamour of noise is only going to increase. Outside our boring, frustrating work environments there are a million different parties, desperate to attend to the senses that are ready to be stimulated of a few hours of desk-tapping and whistling nausea, and the harder they have to work to reach us, the louder they will shout. From the High Street stores, to the fruit and veg salesmen, to the big issue vendor, to the beggar by the cash point – it is one great metropolis of attention seeking. No wonder we cannot think – no wonder it is so difficult to internalise. No wonder I cannot piss without humming the new Beyonce Knowles track.

Maybe this is why I despise unnecessary noise so much. It is ostensibly pointless, yes, it is annoying and selfish, granted, it displays an incredible level of inner emptiness, sure, but it tells me that you have succumbed to the world, and that the market has won, that you have lost the ability to think and to reason and to wonder and to yearn and to love. It’s okay – yawn, piss, kiss your partner – you’ll be far less bored and frustrate if you do. And maybe then you’ll stop bloody whistling.