The Day the Muzak Died

I'm not big on background noise.  In the morning, the first thing I do is start coffee, I don't turn on the radio, or the television.  I like reading my news, not watching videos.  If I want background noise, I'll throw the dogs a toy, or a couple of bones.  Now I know there are quite a number of people who find this odd.  For them, silence is... annoying.  They actually don't mind going to a store and hearing oldies, or country, or whatever playing from speakers over their heads.  Me?  I would prefer not dealing with that sort of distraction.  Give me silence any day.
Last week we had some severe storms go through the area and one of them knocked out the power in the store for about... oh, fifteen minutes.  We were on generators.  When the power finally came back on it was like the finger of God had poked around in the computer room, all systems were running but the Muzak machine had... died.  And I'm standing there in the spray paint aisle, opening a box of Tropical Blue to put on the shelf, thinking to myself 'this is so nice.'

Of course, most people aren't liking this.  Last evening the Night Manager figured out how to get the Country station playing again, but you could barely hear it, and after about a half an hour the music faded away.  You have no idea how nice it is to be able to talk to a customer without hearing Mr. Bojangles dancing in the background.