Prompts Week 1

Prompt 1 - Alone in a quiet room. Listen. What do you hear?

The idea of listening to a quiet room brings to mind the trouble I always have with sleeping. For as long as I can remember, I have never been good at falling asleep, even when I've tried stuff like melatonin or white noise machines that supposedly helps you fall asleep. I've never had a problem getting enough sleep, because once I do pass out there’s pretty much no way to wake me up. But, this problem does force me to lie awake at night trying to get some sleep, usually for hours. Even now that I’m not sleeping alone at night it’s a similar situation, as my girlfriend is one of those lucky people that falls asleep the instant her head hits the pillow. Lying in bed trying to force my eyes shut leaves me to simply listen to what’s around me every night. I live way out in the woods and right next to a lake, which gives me an awesome soundtrack to listen to while I try to rest. In the summer, I listen to crickets in the early parts of the nights, followed by some sweet loons and some noisy frogs from about ten o’clock on, and if I have some real trouble getting to sleep, which happens way too often, I can hear the birds that start singing around four in the morning. I've listened to it enough times that I could almost tell you what time it is by my house simply by listening to animals. The soundtrack gets less interesting as the days get colder, which works out fine because I start closing the windows anyway.

Prompt 2 - Alone in a quiet room. What do you see?

This one instantly makes me think of what could easily the most boring part of my job, counting money. I've been doing it a little less this summer as we've trained a few new managers recently who have been taking it over, but for about two years I spent quite a bit of time locked in a small office with no interruptions while I counted money. I’m fairly good with numbers and such, and was even majoring in math until I decided I couldn't afford that fancy of an education, so I’m pretty quick at counting cash and ended up being the one to do it almost everyday for a long time. When you count cash at my work, the number one rule is that no one else should be in the room with you, unless you've run into a problem, in which case someone can come help you figure out the problem. It usually takes about an hour to do cash but can sometime take longer, especially if money is misplaced or missing and you have to figure out when it went. When problems come up, it can sometimes take a few hours to do the cash-out. So, what I see when I’m alone in a quiet room I see a safe full of tills that I’m dreading counting, knowing that there could be some potential issues sitting in that safe that could quickly turn into a pretty big headache. The cash count can get pretty ugly when you run into big issues, like once when I hit the mother of all problems, having all the computer systems break down. The first time I faced this problem was by far the longest day ever, and since I’m basically the most computer literate at my work, I ended up having to handle the whole thing, from manually recording all the cash over the phone, and then eventually manually closing the store, which a tedious process of recording tons of information which is normally all done via computers. This all happened at the end of a regular 8 hour day which then stretched into a 23 hour day, almost entirely locked in a tiny room with our safe. Memories like dealing with this, and endlessly counting money are what I think of when when I picture being alone in a room.

Prompt 3 - Alone in a quiet room. How did you get here?

During my first year of college, I was working almost entirely closes at my work. The closing shifts runs till about one or two at night, depending on how things are going, and ended with me getting home to a dead silent house. But instead of simply taking the twenty minute or less ride home straight from work, I would generally try to fit in something resembling a social life in a few hours after work. A good friend of mine as some serious sleep disorders, so he was almost guaranteed to be up at the same time, so after I got out of work we would either hop in his car or mine and cruise around on the empty roads in the middle of the night. We would spend the night listening to comedy central radio and throwing tons of miles on my car, sometimes driving up to Bangor or down to Bar Harbor for no reason at all, always taking back roads when possible. To me, the journey to this quiet room is a late night joy rides either listening to stand up comedy or blaring music, which led me to put over sixty thousand miles on my first car in the first year I had it, more than the previous owner had put on it in the eleven years they were driving.