March 19, 2006

• Quiet Reading Area ?The sign read. Lured by the comfortable sofas in there, I lugged my bag there and settled down to read my textbook.

  
  

  Ironically, the silence meant that minor sounds were accentuated to sound like that of pneumatic drills. The uncle in the corner got the ball rolling by repeatedly crinkling his newspaper, which was quite irritating, given that you could almost hear a pin drop. No sooner had the uncle stopped doing that, at the other end of the room, a young chap clicked away endlessly on the touchpad of his laptop. Just when I thought there would be some respite, an old lady coughed. It sounded quite forced, as if she was trying to cough her lungs out. After that, a middle-aged lady began packing her stuff and the rustling of her plastic bag was distracting as she sure took her own sweet time. Not long after she left, I was disturbed by an old man idiosyncrasy of unconsciously audibly mouthing what he was reading. The last straw was a lady handphone going off.

  
  

  Irked, I hauled my stuff to a corner of the library and completed my reading on a hard plastic chair. Somehow, random noises did not perturb me as much although there were interferences. It could have been the enclosed area that served to intensify the sounds, it might have been the expectation of total quietness that made the sounds annoying, but the quiet reading area seemed more discordant than the rest of the library.

  • 2:39 pm
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