Eric had been a piano tuner. All his life. He loved the work. He had perfect pitch and he loved hearing piano strings resonating in perfect harmony with each other. He thrilled at gently tweaking a slightly off key string to bring it back to absolute perfection. This unique combination of precise hearing and delicate manual dexterity had led him to become the best known and most highly regarded piano tuner in the whole country. Other piano tuners aspired to be like him. None ever got close.
One day, almost without warning, tragedy struck. He awoke to feel a pain in the knuckle of his right thumb. Over the next few days the pain got worse. Then he developed an identical one in his right thumb. It wasn’t long until it was so painful for him to tune pianos that he was forced to give up work. And that is when his life started to fall apart. If he wasn’t Eric the piano tuner, who was he? He gradually slipped into a deeper and deeper depression.
One day, as he was shuffling along the streets, going nowhere, not even really aware he was outdoors, he saw a traffic warden giving a ticket to a motorist. He heard the motorist complaining. She was saying, quite convincingly he thought, that she had not seen the parking restriction sign and how unfair it was for her to get a ticket. Eric agreed. At first. But as he listened to her he noticed something strange. There was an inflection in her voice that didn’t sound right. The more he listened the more convinced he was that the woman was lying. His perfect pitch had caught her out, people who told the truth just didn’t sound like that.
Eric still can’t tune pianos. But he has a new career that he loves almost as much. He is an interrogator for MI5. He asks people questions and finds out if they are lying. He is better than any lie detector, he has never been wrong yet.
Eric found out that having perfect pitch was a transferable skill.
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