I have a song stuck in my head. (Heya Tom, it’s Bob from the office down the hall..) Really stuck in my head. (Good to see you buddy, how’ve you been?) It’s going on days now. The current soundtrack playing in my brain is “re: your brains” by Jonathan Coulton. It’s a perky, catchy little song told from the perspective of an office worker proactively proposing a workplan by which he hopes to achieve his vision, should the negotiations conclude favorably, of eating the brains of his coworker. (Things have been OK for me except that I’m a zombie now.) It’s how one might imagine a merger of Shaun of the Dead with Office Space. I particularly like this bit:
I’ve got another meeting Tom, maybe we could wrap it up
I know we’ll get to common ground somehow
Meanwhile I’ll report back to my colleagues who were chewing on the doors
I guess we’ll table this for now
I’m glad to see you take constructive criticism well
Thank you for your time I know we’re all busy as hell
And we’ll put this thing to bed
When I bash your head open
And this bit, which uses the corporate definition of compromise, meaning “let’s figure out a solution in our mutual best interests whereby you agree to do what I want:”
We’re at an impasse here
Maybe we should compromise
If you open the doors
we’ll all come inside and eat your brains
A bunch of folks have made videos for it, which you can watch/listen on YouTube. (These are just a few of them…) (By the way, I cannot be held responsible if you also get this song stuck in your head. Follow these links at your own risk):
- This is the first one I saw. It’s a computer-game style video, with a sort of mideval looking style. (Not the contemporary cubicle-world vision I have).
- I like this one better, which uses a bunch of movie clips.
- This other one uses anime, and is pretty cool.
- There’s also this version of Jonathan Coulton playing in a club.
I think a PowerPoint presentation of would make an appropriate medium for a video. Anyone want to make one?
While I quite like the song, I do hope I get it out of my head soon. It’s like to drive me bonkers.
I generally recover from situations like this, where a song gets stuck in my head for days. But there have been a couple of instances that have left scars. My mind shies away from even the thought of listening to them. I was once tormented by the song Peaches, by the Presidents of the United States, which got stuck in my head for days around the time I worked an all-night inventory in a bookstore. The memory of the song and the bleary-eyed hungover feel of the messed-up sleep schedule are forever linked. The song “Oh yeah” by Yellow (as featured in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) is another one that nearly killed me. And that one doesn’t even have lyrics. (Womp, womp…chktchktkkaawww…)
collecting tokens 