The Headset Marks I Still Have After a Long Shift

There’s a specific pair of dents the headset leaves on the sides of my head after a long shift, right above the ears, and on a bad week I can still feel them faintly by the time I sit down at Deacon’s table that same night. It’s not a complaint exactly, more an observation I only really started paying attention to once someone else pointed it out to me. Deacon noticed first, actually, said something like “you keep rubbing your ears, man, you good?” a couple hours into a session, and I hadn’t even clocked that I was doing it.

Once I started paying attention I noticed I do a version of this with almost everything that presses on me physically for long stretches, gloves, safety glasses, the particular ache of standing on a hangar floor for ten hours straight. There’s a kind of low-grade physical residue that carries over from work into whatever comes after it, and most days I don’t think about it at all, it’s the exact same battle with myself every shift and I just stop noticing I’m having it. But sitting still at a game table for three hours, actually paying close attention to a rulebook or a tableau, seems to be exactly the condition under which I finally notice what my body’s been holding onto all day.

I’ve started to think this is part of why component quality matters as much to me as it does when I’m reviewing a game. A flimsy player board that flexes under a light touch, a cube that won’t sit straight on its track, register to me almost the same way a badly fitted piece of safety gear does, a small persistent physical wrongness that I can’t quite ignore once I’ve noticed it, even if nobody else at the table seems bothered. Renata thinks this connection is a little bit of a stretch when I try to explain it to her, and maybe it is. But I notice what doesn’t fit right against my body for a living, professionally, with actual consequences if I miss it, and I don’t think that instinct just switches off the second I clock out and sit down across from Deacon.

The dents fade by the second game usually, an hour or so into whatever we’re playing, and by then I’ve mostly forgotten they were ever there. But I like that Deacon noticed before I did. It’s a small thing, rubbing your own ears without realizing it, but it’s the kind of small thing that tells you something true about how a body carries a whole workday into a night that’s supposed to be nothing like it.