Work. Why did they have to call it "work," anyway?
Oh yeah, sometimes it's loud.
I may have fairly sensitive ears, but I don't get overloaded from just high volumes of sound or even bright lights. While I still have a threshold, mine is quite a ways from what you are describing. Maybe you don't know, but, I listen to my own music very loud, sometimes - on my own. An average person would not be able to tolerate my home sound system for more than a few minutes, but I love it and I consider it a type of personal therapy. My system is capable of fairly high sound pressure level beginning in the sub-audible range. Ask Odeon to verify, but low frequency sound takes some tricks and lots of power.
At work I don't have the pleasure of my own music, though. It is often canned mixes from a corporate distribution on CD or a hard drive that we switch out on scheduled dates. I just have to block that out and NOT hear it, so to speak. I can do that fairly well for about three or four hours on a better day, but by the end of a long day, I am somewhat overloaded. I have been guilty of showing up here whacked out from work and trying to post before I found my center and calmed myself down. Some people thought I was drunk. In fact my wife still thinks I am drunk, sometimes, when I am whacked from sensory overload - stumbling around, bumping into things, unable to sit still, slurring my speech, jumping out of my skin if touched, talking a hundred miles per hour and way too loudly, not making sense, obsessively manipulating something, spinning or tapping things - it's typical low functioning behavior actually, now that I know what that means.
I am lucky in that I am usually working in the warehouse, while the store is open, or at least back and forth to the front, carrying things out to the sales floor or re-setting some display that has to be changed for an advertisement. I can deal with short bursts of extreme annoyances for quite a while, but if I was going to our store to buy a television or a refrigerator (something that I was going to have to live with for a long time) I would hardly be able to think long enough to make a good purchase decision. My wife would have to come with me and hold my hand (
).
Honestly, the lights bother me more than the sounds though. They use mercury vapor lighting for economy, but they are not well dispersed or balanced. There are dark spots and bright spots. Also as the fixtures and bulbs age the spectrum they produce drifts a little and some spots are a different color. I am sensitive to the color of light and to a balance of intensity of the light also. Again, I have a wide tolerability threshold, but it adds up after a while. It has nothing to do with the overall brightness, though. When I was working in photography, I had no problems with the studio strobes I used, either. In fact I always kept my eyes open normally during the exposure flash and I am able to see the balance of the strobes. If one of them is getting weak, I am always the first to notice. (I could also tell by the sound they made.) More importantly, I was absolutely sure what the portrait would look like and I knew if my timing was not good and I had missed an expression. I KNEW if I had a blnk. I knew that a light hit the nose from above when it shouldn't. I knew if I had given them Rudolph Syndrome by allowing a strobe to light their nose from behind making it glow red. I could see it and it does not hurt me.
The weird thing is that the lights in our store are enough different from each other that when I look across the store I see a landscape like dunes in a desert or something, because of how much brighter some areas are. I have actually given names to some of the more over achieving lights, like Spike and Tiger, and old geezer names, like Gerard and Reginald for some of the wimpy ones. Sounds stupid, but that helps to distract me and prevent me from succumbing to the vertigo, dizziness and kinetosis that I feel as I look across the uneven landscape of lighting.
As bad as all that sounds, I can deal with ALL of that a hell of a lot easier than I can deal with a constant parade of new people to have to work with on some personal level. I've been there almost four months and there are now only about sixty people who work there. When the store is open there are usually only fifteen to twenty people there. I'm talking about fellow employees, only. There are always eight or ten people who I have not allowed contact with, except for "strictly business" reasons and it was very quick answers, directions, questions, etc, but absolutely no exchange of personality fluids, if you know what I mean. I can only let in so many people at a time. If I work there long enough, I will eventually get to know and (be forced to) interact with all of them, but it is slow for me to do that. At my rate it will be over a year, before I can allow that many people. Customers are not so bad, because I know they will go away soon.
I have been told over and over that I am a really good salesman, but I don't think so and I certainly don't want to spend a day on the sales floor. Yes I have sold a bunch of stuff up there already, but it was always just answering a few questions at first and I really don't know enough about many of the procedures to do that job well. Now I have learned buttloads about much of what we sell and I can answer even more questions, so if the customer is there to buy already, I can help them find what they want and show them where to pay. I also have spent much of my life on the road away from "my comfort zone" so I have this instinct to take back-up stuff and keep every eventuality covered. This leads me to ask the customer if they have cables or cleaners or media or power strips or flash drives or cases, etc. They have a fancy name for that on the sales floor, but to me that's just my way of giving them everything they want so they will go away sooner.
