A Lifetime of Tiny Ear Punches

The closest place to our apartment where you can buy food is the Coop.

Fact: This is about 83 times bigger than the Coop near our place.

That’s what it’s called, the Coop. Not as in ‘chicken coop,’ although that would make as much sense because you can get eggs there. Rather, it appears to be short for ‘cooperative’, because you can buy some kind of shares in it if you want. I choose to contribute by giving them most of my money in exchange for vegetables and milk instead. Interestingly, because of the way their language is structured the Japanese don’t enunciate each syllable. Instead they treat the double O like a long vowel, so you end up with a drawn out cooooope.

But that’s not even close to the weirdest thing about the Coop.

The weirdest thing about the Coop is the music. The word ‘purgatory’ was invented to describe the Coop’s choice of music. On a never-ending, interminable hellish loop the same 40 seconds tune plays, forever. Actually tune might be being too generous. I think they are actually playing the chorus of every Daft Punk song simultaneously and backwards. If you listen really hard at 0:27 you can kind of hear John Lennon whispering that Paul is dead and it was this song that killed him.

"Because I'm Jesus, Paul. That's why."

Before the end of my very first visit to the Coop I hated that song, the person who wrote it, the people who played it for recording, and the world that would allow such behaviour to continue despite the 1989 UN Convention against Ear Torture that was enacted to try and pre-empt Daft Punk and failed spectacularly.

But I was only in there for 10 minutes! What happens to the people who work there every single day?!

Let’s look at this from another perspective: I used to work for an electronics retailer. My job was to convince people to spend more money than they had planned to on stuff they probably didn’t need. So Christmas is a natural fit, right? So natural, in fact, that they would break out the Christmas carols in the middle of November. That’s 8.75% of the working year spent listening to the same CD of Christmas Carols. Hamburgers are fantastic, but if you eat them every day they’ll kill you. The same is true of Christmas Carrols. I used to like Christmas Carols. But the human ear is only designed to handle Christmas Carols in small doses. For the years that I worked at this place, by the time Christmas actually arrived my Christmas spirit was so shriveled and embittered that I had a hard time even mustering up enough Christmas spirit to eat 4kg of ham. And now whenever I meet somebody named Carol I have an urgent desire to stab myself in the ears.

Me, circa November 17th.

So that’s an example of what six weeks of musical torture can do to a human being. I just want to point out one more time that there are people who work in the Coop for their job and that this song has nothing to do with Christmas, except when it’s Christmas – then it becomes their Christmas song.

Let’s say you work for the Coop for 10 years. By my calculations, you have heard the Coop song 68 billion times and you hate the entire world. It’s a fair assumption. But here’s where it gets really trippy. Most Coop employees are some of the most cheerful individuals I have ever met. How is this even possible? Occam’s razor suggests the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. So: brainwashing.

I suspect that through a combination of musical science and maybe drug-laced rice, ex-ninjas are retrenched to work for the Coop. The Coop song keeps these employees docile and helps them complete their work in a timely and efficient manner (they have 40 seconds to complete each task). If the song should ever stop for any reason, Coop staff will probably tweak out and snap the necks of every customer in the store. I think the urge lies dormant just beneath the surface even now. One of the employees at our local Coop thought my wife looked tired and indicated that she could do with a massage. By demonstrating on me. Now the word massage can have different connotations depending on how much of pervert you are, so let me be clear: when I say massage I mean Spetznaz Death Grip Shoulder Grapple. There was no happy ending. There was an only an unhappy ending, preceeded by an unhappy start and an unhappy middle. This guy massaged me to within an inch of my life. It took him 1.7 seconds. I think he orchestrated the whole thing just to send me a message.

Well, message received, buddy. I will continue to shop at your store out of fear for my life. But I am wearing my iPod every time. I just don’t trust that song.