Whistling While You Work

One day, I was in the restroom stall at work when a whistler walked in mid-melody, but stopped short to spare the guy at the urinal.

It bothered me. His unfinished melody was just hanging there and needed to come back home to the tonic, so I did the reasonable thing and whistled off the rest of the riff.

There was a brief pause as the man contemplated. On the one hand, there was bathroom etiquette. On the other, I had challenged him to a duel. My clairvoyance picked up an inaudible “Fuck it” before he proceeded to whistle the next line, continuing the call-and-response from the toilet next door.

Our corporate commodes lived in rooms with four walls, so I could comfortably whistle my freak flag in private. My purple shoes would have been dead giveaways under normal stalls. The high ceilings gave us cathedral-grade reverb, basically turning the tiles into our backing choir. We traded solos loud and proud, sometimes incorporating multiple orifices at once for percussive punctuation.

At some point it got a little too weird, even by my standards, and it occurred to me that I should probably bounce before Dude was done. I don’t think either of us wanted to know who the other weirdo was on the other side of the wall.

But there wasn’t a clear victor. I needed closure, so I broke out the big guns. I had saved my ace in the hole, a warble that took years to perfect. My tweet rivaled the sweetest of songbirds — less melody and more free-form jazz. I went on for a few measures before whirling to a stop with a dissonant dual tone that I learned from Jim Carrey in The Truman Show — when he was drawing on the mirror, making flying-saucer sounds.

Try it out: just hum and whistle at the same time. If you do it right, the dueling harmonics are super eerie and can clear a room in no time. My dog hated that noise and would scold me if I broke it out.

Urinal guy ran for the hills when my stall started sounding like the hub of an alien spacecraft.

There was no response. I waited for some kind of concession — applause, a groan, anything. All I got was the fluorescent hum. I couldn’t tell if the silence was the “sound” of defeat or if my neighbor was just contemplating his next move…

“Plop.”

It was done. He was pooped.

There wasn’t a mic to drop, so I flushed the toilet.

As I finished washing my hands, relishing in the weirdest victory ever, the most wonderful sounds began floating out of the whistler’s stall. They reminded me of the nightingales that lulled me to sleep in Macedonia.

Celestial sounds were dancing across the ceramic-tiles. As I was walking out, the now-distinguished gentleman slipped in a few trills that would have twisted my tongue right off. The door slammed behind me, sealing the verdict.

There was no question. He beat me.

But can you ever truly defeat a whistler?

Whistling while you work isn’t just for show. It’s an assertion of self in a place built to strip you down to a role. You might be able to out-spreadsheet the whistler, but you can’t silence them.

Another existential ritual is the workplace shit. It’s one of the few officially sanctioned pauses from performance, a small private place where the day’s metrics fall away and you get to be messy, human, honest. In that stall, for two minutes, you rehearse ideas, invent jokes, and plan your escape from corporate life.

Add the workplace whistle to your corporate constitution and you’ve carved out a little pocket of self-sovereignty.

So sure, he beat me on sound. He won the duel. But he didn’t win at what counts, which is the capacity to be undeterred, to keep making noise. That’s a victory we share with every whistler alike, with all the good men who rage against the dying of the light. A victory you can’t tick off on a performance review.

When we got back to our desks, an impromptu meeting request had arrived in our inboxes – a drop-everything, all-hands-on-deck kinda thing.

So we all gathered in the conference room and hopped on the call. Our CMO got right to business announcing $300 million dollars in layoffs – just in time for Christmas.

Nothing says holiday spirit like Santa outsourcing the elves to Bangladesh.

None of us were about to go back to work, so we decided to grab lunch. As we piled into the van, the colleague next to me began to hum a familiar tune, and I had no choice but to finish him off.

We looked up at each other like long-lost brothers, separated by tractor beams at birth.

I wanted to give the guy a hug, but it was a delicate situation. We both knew that if one of us started laughing or confronted the other weirdo, then we’d have to tell the story to everyone. So we shut the hell up. It was our little secret.

His secret, rather. I’ve no shits to give.