Whistle

Just whistle while you work; And cheerfully together we can tidy up the place; So hum a merry tune; It won't take long when there's a song to help you set the pace.

And the Thais have taken the song to heart. However, it’s not a cheerful little song that they whistle but rather they blare their lungs out on the little plastic police whistles that you only rarely hear in the west—and then only after you’ve snatched a purse and are running down the street. From parking attendants that loiter in every park in the country to crossing guards, and, of course, the police themselves, if they are a issued a whistle they will take it as their solemn duty to blow it for the full 8 hours they are on the clock.

I have hypothesized that there is perhaps some meaning behind the whistles—they’re simply too vehement and frequent to be mindless noise. So, I’ve listened as the parking attendants guide my car backwards. Perhaps, they’ll all use one long toot to tell me to stop and shorter ones to say “slow” down. Maybe the crossing guard will blow the whistle to start and stop traffic? Maybe he’ll only blow it when it’s safe for pedestrians to cross in consideration for the blind? However, after 8 years here no pattern has emerged and I must either conclude that I am too simple minded to understand the Thai whistle language or, actually, there is no meaning behind it at all.

I’ll leave it to the reader to try and figure out which conclusion I have come to, but I do find that whistles are but a symptom of the Thai people’s attitude toward sound in general. Nearly every public space has some high-volume background noise blaring at you: in department stores, there’s the sales girl with the microphone on stage yelling “ka”, “ka”, “ka”, like a bird, in Big C you have a terrible commercial filled radio station going all the time, pubs have the music up so high you can’t hear your friends talk. I don’t think I have ever been to a large public space here where there isn’t some sort of epic din.

My solution? Well, I won’t go shopping at Big C without my noise canceling headphones, I avoid Central and the other department stores on Sunday when the big crowds and the screaming girls come out. However, I can’t stop the whistling. It’s just too omnipresent to be avoided. Oh god, I just can’t stop the whistling!