I was walking around with some open-ear bone-conducting headphones on the other night before bed trying to corral my daughter. They were connected to my phone but with no audio playing. I had forgotten I had them on.

And also didn’t realize that the volume was all the way up.

Then, as I was walking into my daughter’s dark bedroom, silent but for the calming white noise of a fan, I got a work email to my outlook app and it felt like the notification sound was coming from every direction, emanating from the very walls directly into my soul. I stopped and said out loud “What the actual fuck was that?!” before I remembered the headphones were on. A nice corporate jump scare to start the evening right.