Offending Speaker

This is the source of the tinkly winkly music that I am forced to listen to while waiting for my doctors appointments!

Today was particularly bizarre. Someone had evidently pressed the "scan" button on the player, so we were treated to a loop of approximately 15 minutes during which we heard the first 10 seconds of each track followed by a pause of 3-4 seconds.

The "relaxing music" consisted of Italian Baroque (Four Seasons and assorted other Baroque violin concerti), English Pastoral (Percy Grainger, Vaughan Williams etc), English Baroque (Handel - Water Music), Soft Classics (Swan from Carnival of the Animals etc), and an Andrew Lloyd Webber selection (Phantom, Joseph, JC Superstar etc).

But only ever the first 10 seconds of each track. It was like playing some sort of surreal "Name that Tune". Part of me wanted to turn the volume down, part of me wanted to go and locate the player so I could stop the crazy scanning thing, part of me wanted to rip the speaker off the wall and jump on it, and the part of me that is still a music teacher wanted to hand out worksheets and pencils to everyone in the waiting room and get them to write about each piece!

I didn't actually do any of those things. I took a photo of the speaker (which aroused enough interest) and then I did a few calculations to work out that there were between 60 and 70 tracks on the loop, and then, thanks to the Lloyd Webber, I sat back and thought about Lee Mead in a loincloth!