When I was working at HP in 1985, I went to the corporate offices in Palo Alto to discuss some important technological thing or another. I was standing in a standard HP building with cubicles, some half-high, adjacent to conference rooms. I noticed something eerie. Everything was dead quiet. Really dead quiet.
I started talking to a woman in one of the cubicles and noticed that I could only hear her . . nothing else. It was eerie. She said it was caused by noise cancelling. HP decided to try it in their corporate offices to see if it really worked. It did!
Thirty years later, I have a BOSE noise cancelling headphone that is head and earlobes better than any other headphones that I have ever had. When I use it in an airplane, the plane noise virtually disappears . . of course, I am usually wearing my hearing aids. Maybe, I should have just removed my hearing aids. I’ll try that next time.
Nancy just told me that the new Honda Insights had to add engine noise to the car because it was too quiet. Hmmm . . I guess if we really eradicated small pox, we would have to go back and infect a percentage of the population to give people the peace of mind that they are living in the real world.
This may explain why we can’t eliminate the use of assault weapons. People just have to hear the sound of Glocks tearing human beings to shreds . . just to feel that all is right with the world.