Overheard · 22 May 2001
This morning at breakfast my face kept getting smashed into my poached eggs on toast by the woman sitting behind me. She had some laugh, this woman: a sternum-rattling, eye-crossing muh huh hwaaah guffaw with a beginning, middle and end, its own peaks and valleys (it was a laugh with topography). Chitchat with her companions this morning must have been hi fucking larious. I kept telling myself there’s no malice in having a good time.
Of the seven years in which I worked in a corporate environment, two were spent sitting at a desk while an otherwise perfectly likeable person with a similarly, um, forthright ability to express amusement worked in the cubicle just outside my office door, finding something extremely funny two or three times an hour. Safe to say it’s easy to develop a slow, simmering loathing for the people you’re locked up with for eight hours a day – guaranteed if you have to listen to them talk on the phone – but this laugh! I developed a tick. It’s not entirely gone.
Now, unless my upstairs neighbour is on a Tragically Hip bender, I’m fine. Undistracted. Nothing boring holes in my brain. Except for Anna Dee.
Every afternoon, over the course of All Things Considered on the NPR station I get out of Seattle, there are five traffic reports, each delivered by Anna Dee. I’m Anna Dee. Thanks Patricia, this is Anna Dee for KUOW. The nyah-nyah nasality of her voice, the faux-congenial chitchat with the host, the constant, incessant, restating of her name. I’m Anna Dee. I’m Anna Dee. And this is Seattle, for chrissake. A lot of traffic news. Iman Idee.
I mean, it’s not becoming an obsession or anything.
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