Am I Really Hearing This?

I forgot my headphones at work.  I also forgot to charge my mp3 player.

It isn't necessarily that I want to listen to music or what have you...  It's the "drowning out of my coworkers" that I'm looking for.

It was bad enough when a few months back I got to listen to monologue about Twilight... through the eyes of a 50-odd year old male engineer.  Seriously, dude.  You are thinking about this WAY too much.

Or when I overheard another coworker talk to her boss in a not quiet voice about how she had to leave for the day to get her kids because her husband just got a DUI at 2:30 in the afternoon.  Seriously.  Do you understand the concept of "inside voice"?  Really.  I don't want to know that this is his third DUI, or that he was supposed to be at work. 

So yesterday, I was calmly placing orders, calmly fixing problems, calmly writing "You're a freaking idiot" emails in corporate-ese, and calmly cussing out my computer when it locked up every 15 minutes, and all of a sudden I heard out of nowhere, "Well, you know, his parents were murdered."

Am I supposed to ignore this?

At that moment, my boss called.  Crap!  It was time for our weekly one on one meeting.  Having a boss in another state is kind of awesome in the sense that it's almost impossible for them to micromanage you, but they don't completely forget you exist.  Once a week we touch base and I tell him nothing is on fire and he tells me I haven't been fired yet, and then we go on our separate merry ways.

I may have been a little distracted when he called this week.  If someone was recording just my side of the conversation, it would have gone something like this:

"Uh, huh?" I said, "Yeah. Sorry, what? Oh. OK.  Um. Yes.  No, nothing to report. Sure, I can do that. OK, have a good one."  This was one of the shorter conversations we have had.

I have no idea what the other side of the conversation sounded like.  I was desperately trying to overhear more about this whole MURDER thing.

After my boss hung up, I had a moment of panic.  What did I just agree to?  When I tried to recall anything, my brain went back to the little snippets I did remember.

Me, sitting on my desk trying not to knock any pictures off the wall, or clunk my head on the overhanging cabinet,  trying to hear the murdery conversation over the cubicle wall.

"...he was raised by...." mumble mumble mumble, "...it is really a pretty tragic story, and he was obviously messed up by..."...mumble..."...yeah, he saw them die..."...another person speaking inaudibly... "...well, he didn't have to worry about money, his father was a billionaire..."

I'll admit, sometimes I am a little dense.  But in my defense I was trying so hard to hear the conversation, I wasn't really processing what I was hearing.

And then it clicked.

Because then I head the word, "Gotham".

Dude was talking about Batman.  All serious like.

I may have even blushed.

At that moment, someone walked by the entrance to my cubicle, and I tried to shift my awkward sitting position into a yoga pose.  I was totally stretching, not eavesdropping.  He did a double-take, but didn't stop.  He was walking over to talk to my cube neighbor about Iron Man 2.

What is it about large corporations that make grown men talk about cartoons?