Robot + Loud Music = Fail

I’m not one to shy away from and deny those aspects of me that are – how should I put this? – not worthy of being spoken about without double and triple-checking my surroundings, or surveying the type of people in the same room as I am.
For that reason, I tend to keep my intense love of tennis a secret when I meet a group of beer-drinking guys at a braai. I’d rather not mention how much I love Miss Congeniality (parts 1 and 2) when everyone else is throwing great heaps of praise upon the action-packed Inception and I will certainly not bring along my collection of Mariah, Whitney and Celine Dion CD’s to a friend’s house party.
It is that last point that is the topic of this, my first post. While I usually – subconsciously – turn up my car’s windows when stopping at a robot to avoid being judged or possibly laughed at for my apparently “boring, mainstream, old-school” taste in music, on one particular morning last week, I got so caught up in the moment that I didn’t see or hear the biker roaring to a stop alongside me.
When I did reach down to turn down the volume (while trying to stop singing at the same time), it was too little, too late. Yes, he caught me right in the middle of the last third of We Belong Together. It was made all the more humiliating that this part of the song featured an octave raise of epic proportions.

Still, I casually turned down the volume and pretended all was perfectly and acceptably normal in the world. I did catch a peripheral view of a helmet being turned slowly and resentfully in my direction, however, which proved that the cool, macho biker was very unimpressed.
After what seemed like the same amount of time it takes for a learner drive to commence the checking of his or her blindspots, the robot turned green. To say that the biker angrily stormed off and crashed into the horizon is an understatement.

His disgust was later my amusement as I laughed at my little mishap, volume back at its usual coloured level of intensity; known in some circles as “KAK mooi” and in others as “an utter disgrace”…
Let’s just say – I’ll be using the air-conditioner from now on whenever I feel that insane desire to break into song.

“we belong togeeetheeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr”