Trigger Happy Jack

When I was visiting the Stonehearts last weekend, Pooh mentioned that she had had a Beck song stuck in her head all week long. She had been up in Canada for her job, and had seen this recycling bin whose label of "Bottles and Cans" triggered Beck's "Where It's At" every time:

Bottles and cans
Just clap your hands
Just clap your hands
Where it's at!
I got two turntables and a microphone . . .

I feel her pain; I have often been the victim of the insidious Trigger Song.

My mind is highly susceptible to attempts to getting songs stuck in it; sometimes it takes actually hearing a song for it to get embedded, there are certain words and phrases which will conjure up a song to plague me every time. Rebel Monkey and I would refer to these as Trigger Phrases, which in turn would summon the accompanying Trigger Song.

A prime example was when I worked for a brief time at a telemarketing firm (please, don't hate me because of it; working there wound up making me physically ill), which used a dry erase board with our names on it to record our daily sales. Every single day I would look up at the board, see the name of one of my co-workers, and have the following song stuck in my head:

The sailors say Brandy, you're a fine girl
What a good wife you would be
But my life, my lover, my lady
Is the sea

Every. Single. Day.

Had a similar situation at the OSU library; every time I'd be processing requests for a patron with the last name Reyes-Duarte, I'd get a song from Evita stuck in my head, substituting the patron's name for the real lyric of "Eva Duarte."

Colonel Peron
Eva Reyes-Duarte
I've heard
So much
About you

My vulnerability to the Trigger Song increases when I'm bored and/or sleep deprived; one of my Library Science classes was a veritable mine-field of Trigger Songs thanks to this. It got to the point where I was keeping a list of all of the songs that ran through my head during the course of each class period to help keep myself focused. The most frequent Trigger was discussion of the Government Printing Office, usually referred to by its acronym, GPO. Any guess where this is going?

Little GTO GPO
You're really looking fine
C'mon and turn it on, wind it up, blow it out GTO GPO

Cases like this are the worst, since I only know part of the lyrics, and am thus unable to sing the whole song through to its completion, effectively banishing it from my thoughts; instead, I just have the same snippet of song lyrics playing in an endless loop until the next Trigger comes along.

Those are the Triggers which stick out the most in my mind, since they were each encountered so frequently, but I know there are countless others that I’m not thinking off, possibly as a result of my subconscious trying to shield me from summoning them up from the depths. But, as new Triggers are discovered and encountered, I’ll be sure to keep you posted; after all, what is this blog for if not to arm my friends and family with sufficient ammunition to torment me constantly?