The Impotent Satyr
Danielle Owdley, Olympia Furniture Company's sign-spinner on Harrison Ave, is good at her job. She twirls and spins and flips her sign, all while smiling and waving to west-bound drivers on their way to spending a tearful evening at Comcast. But everything isn't all sign flips and finger flips--a strict requirement for the job has Danielle listening to autonomous sensory meridian response, or ASMR, entirely of people touching furniture.
"I didn't have to pass a drug test before I got hired. Hell, they didn't even call any of my references," Danielle told The Impotent Satyr. "The only thing they asked of me was to provide my own earbuds so I could listen to the business-provided MP3 player. At first I was bummed that I didn't get to play my own music, but then it took a turn for the weird when the first track 'Fingernails on a leather Bladen loveseat from the Coffee collection' started playing."
The recording was roughly sixteen minutes in length, with the originator of the noises taking their time dragging all ten fingers (one-at-a-time) across every inch of the chair. Thinking it a mistake, Danielle skipped to the next track. A soft voice spoke in her ear, "Gently digging my heels into a polyester Wixon ottoman from the Slate collection." Pinching herself to wake up from the strange dream she was in, Danielle told us that she turned on her heels and marched back inside the main building to ask if she had received the wrong media player.
"I walked into Mr. Nelson's office and found him rubbing his chin on a Coaster memory foam mattress right next to a microphone in a sound-proof room!" Danielle then asked him if he had recorded all the tracks on the MP3 player. "He looked at me proudly and said 'Yes'--he'd recorded over four-hundred hours of furniture ASMR, and he asked me how I liked it."
Fearing that her job was in danger if she told the truth, Danielle said it surprised her, but she enjoyed it. "Then he just smiled so big at me--he had a pillow feather stuck to his stubble--and said that he couldn't wait for me to go through all of the tracks on the player so that I could move on to the next device that featured amateur stuff he'd recorded at home."
That was twelve weeks ago. Danielle is still spinning to this day, and she says that she's still uncomfortable with the recordings. "It's always 'blank body part rubbing on blank furniture piece'. And the scary thing is I've listened to hundreds of hours of it now and, even without a verbal cue, I can tell the furniture piece, the upholstery used, the thread count, and even which body part that's causing the friction."
Danielle shivered. "Mr. Nelson has...a particular fondness for elbows on suede."
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