I want to like working from home. For the most part I do. I can sleep later. I don’t need to change out of my pajamas. This is the first apartment I’ve ever had without roommates, too, so I should be able to actually focus on work. Should.

I don’t know if you could call anywhere in Staten Island “cheap,” but I’m not living in a penthouse either. Maybe if I did, whoever built my neighborhood might have actually finished. This is my third month here, my second week working remotely, and they’re still doing construction. Probably the same construction. Then construction holds up traffic. Then all the drivers get mad and start honking and yelling and I don’t even know what half the noises they’re making are. You get used to a certain level of noise pollution just by living in the city, but not when it’s all the noises all at once. Sunup to sundown, the room shakes from the pounding barrage of horns and jackhammers from intersection to intersection.

The only thing that really helps is this little radio from middle school. Just an old Sony clock radio. Nothing fancy. It’s a four-inch cube with big green digital letters and a dial that never really hit the exact station you wanted. Last week was the first time I’d used it in years. The Spotify on my laptop wasn’t covering the horns and jackhammers outside, so I figured it’d be worth a try. And it actually worked, when it actually worked. There came a point when I realized I wasn’t just missing the station on the dial. The static and garbled audio were from it being nearly a decade and half old. I’d be surprised if it makes it another couple days. But my boss keeps sending me spreadsheets on Google. And if I’m not listening to fuzzy FM, I’m listening to smashing concrete and grinding metal. If I want to do my job, I need a new radio. And if I’m getting a new radio, it might as well get a nice one.

A buddy of mine recommends a place in Manhattan. I’m barely in the door before a salesman almost magically appears in front of me asking if I’ve been helped. I tell him about my noise issues and he says “I got the perfect stereo for you. Top of the line! Satellite Digital Audio Radio Service with Bluetooth surround sound and noise cancellation technology! You put this guy on, you won’t even hear yourself speak!”

“Noise cancellation technology?” I ask. “Don’t you need headphones for that?”

“Nope! All from the speakers themselves. Real space age technology. Stuff NASA uses to keep astronauts’ eardrums from blowing up when the rockets go off. These babies can more than handle New York.”

“So, you’re guaranteeing it’ll completely mask construction and traffic?”

“Trust me! You won’t even know what happened!”

The box had to be like eighty pounds, but I still got it to my car, and somehow managed to get it up the stairs when I got to my building. I pop open the box and try to make sense of the mess of plastic inside. The instructions say I need to make five towers, each with three speakers positioned strategically around my living space. Once I get the towers built, I need to sync them with the base unit. Which means putting the three-tiered structure together and making sure to wire each together correctly. To sync the towers, I need to enter the codes from each speaker. Individually. But before that, I need to make sure the front display touch screen works, which means a calibration check where I have to touch a red dot somewhere on the screen. Then it has to connect to WiFi so it can update the time and weather. When that loads, I have to download the smart phone app just to make the weird pop ups stop. Then the app has to load all the speaker codes directly from the base unit. Fine. I didn’t need my phone for that hour anyway.

Then finally, I get the entire stereo connected and ready to go. I pull out my phone, open the app, and check the box that says “Noise Cancellation.” I hit the button that says “Radio.”

 

Chris Cole is a writer from the greater Kansas City area. His work has appeared in “Rise of the Flightless: A Penguin v. Robots Comics Anthology,” “Cryptids, Kaiju & Corn, Vol. 2,” and “Tales to Terrify.” He is currently the cast director for VikingFest in St. Joseph, MO.