You Picked the Wrong Room
Most of us have never made a conscious decision about what plays while we work. A three-day internet radio weekend, a wrong-room moment on Friday, and a trivia answer that landed harder than it should have.
Dropped off the Mrs. this morning and started the walk back. Sun already out, Teva sandals, new polo — the kind of morning where you want something playing before you’ve even decided what. Flipped on a station and landed inside a show that felt right for a Monday. Easy listening, adult alternative, the kind of music that moves without demanding anything from you. The weekend’s big internet radio event had officially wrapped the night before, but a lot of the same people were still in the room. Light chatter in the feed about how it had gone. Someone had reached out on LinkedIn. The community was still warm.
It started three days earlier in a completely different way.
Friday was the first day of a three-day event — 24 internet radio hosts, each doing two-hour shows, built around 1980s music and culture. I had forgotten it was happening. Just sat down to work, flipped on a station the way I usually do, and started listening. One show I landed on was heavy — headbanging territory. There’s a time for that. End of day, energy to burn, air guitar in the living room, maybe something closer to an actual mosh if the moment calls for it. Friday afternoon with a work session in front of me wasn’t that time. I backed out and found something that fit better. That moment of backing out felt ordinary.
Then later in the day it clicked: some of these shows I’d been half-listening to were actually in the lineup. These were the hosts. This was the event. And I’d been treating it like background.
That changed things. Saturday I did my own show in the morning — good session, everything worked — and then made it a point to be an actual attendee for the rest of the weekend. Listened to most of the shows across Saturday and Sunday. Stayed when it fit, moved when it didn’t, but stayed present in a way Friday hadn’t been.
By most accounts, Eric — the organizer — pulled off something that’s harder than it looks. Twenty-four hosts over three days, audiences running twenty to forty listeners per show, the chat alive with callbacks and recognition and the particular shorthand that a shared era produces. The ironworker and the office worker and whoever else — all in the same digital room, trading a reference language that still works thirty-some years later. That’s not nostalgia exactly. It’s more like inventory. Things you absorbed during years that seemed like they were just happening to you, turning out to be something you actually carry.
The Monday morning show — JustinOnAir, post-event, not part of the lineup but drawing from the same crowd — had a trivia question partway through. Three out of ten men have this problem. The chat did what chat does: went everywhere before the actual answer landed. Erectile dysfunction. Cheating. Testicular fortitude. The real answer was holes in their underwear. But one answer came in before the reveal and it didn’t get laughed off the way the others did: they hate their job. The host said honestly it’s probably closer to ten out of ten.
What I kept thinking was: the more interesting question isn’t whether they hate it. It’s whether they’ve ever noticed what’s actually playing in the background while they’re building the thing they’d rather be doing instead — and whether they’re even in the right room when it matters.
Friday I wasn’t. Made it right by Saturday.
