I can hear them. The voices. They’re in my head.

One prob­lem that has to be addressed at a fes­ti­val like the one I’m cur­rently work­ing is com­mu­ni­ca­tion between staff mem­bers. This is com­monly solved with walkie-talkies and occa­sional cell-phone usage. The walkie-talkies that we have are set up like the ones emer­gency per­son­nel often carry — the main unit clips to your belt, while a small hand­set clips to your col­lar. My pre­ferred con­fig­u­ra­tion is radio behind me with the cord run­ning up my back to the hand­set, which is clipped to the left side of my collar.

I’ve been work­ing 12–16 hour days lately, with the radio turned on at all times. Even with dif­fer­ent chan­nels for dif­fer­ent parts of the staff (pro­duc­tion, pro­gram­ming, admin­is­tra­tion, etc.), there’s alot of radio chat­ter. You can get so used to the con­stant noise that at the end of the day, when you take your radio off, you expe­ri­ence a bizarre phenomenon.

I call it “phan­tom radio,” but I’ve heard it referred to sim­ply as “radio­head.” Appar­ently this phe­nom­e­non man­i­fests itself dif­fer­ently for dif­fer­ent peo­ple. Some peo­ple hear just a buzz or hum. I hear actual trans­mis­sions. I don’t always hear words, but I def­i­nitely hear mul­ti­ple iden­ti­fi­able peo­ple talk­ing. Since I keep my hand­set clipped to the left side of my col­lar, only my left ear is affected.

It usu­ally takes me a cou­ple of days after the fes­ti­val is over to get rid of the voices com­pletely. Until then, I’ll just try to ignore what they try to tell me.