Stairway to Heaven Goes Both Ways

And a Lesson on Listening, Laughter, and Neck Wind Sensors

It began like any other regular morning in the office.

Emails pretending to be urgent, phones ringing just enough to sound important, and our boss locked in his cabin, doing what bosses do—speaking in hushed tones that somehow carry farther than normal voices.

Then came the laughter.

Not the polite chuckle he reserved for client calls. This was actual laughter. The kind that makes the glass walls of a cabin feel like part of a sitcom set. And then, the highlight of the morning:

“Mohan!” he called out, his voice bubbling with excitement. “Do you know who I was talking to?”

Now, this sounded like a rhetorical question. Still, like a well-trained sitcom character, I walked over, curious but cautious, and smiled.

“Robert Plant,” he said, grinning like a schoolboy who just met the voice behind his favourite anthem.
“I spoke to Robert Plant.”

That explained the laughter. The name alone was enough to light up certain neurons in the brains of people born before streaming services were a thing.

For the benefit of younger readers: Robert Plant is the iconic lead singer of Led Zeppelin, the band that gave the world immortal tracks like Stairway to Heaven, Kashmir, and Whole Lotta Love. With a voice that could wail, whisper, and roar—sometimes all in one line—Plant helped define the sound of classic rock.

Of course, the man on the other end of the call wasn’t that Robert Plant. He just happened to share the name. But that didn’t stop my boss from feeling like he had dialled into rock ‘n’ roll history for five glorious minutes.

And that’s when it all made sense. He wasn’t really telling the whole office. He was telling me.

Because I was the only one who’d get the joke.
The only other person in the room old enough to remember the golden age of rock and roll without Googling it.
The only one who didn’t need to ask, “Who?”

I laughed. Not just because it was funny. But because I got it. And he knew I would. The reference. The absurdity. The sheer joy of having a private inside joke land exactly where it was meant to.

The others in the office—bless them—looked confused. They weren’t not curious. They were just not born when “Stairway to Heaven” was the unofficial anthem of teenage rebellion.

This wasn’t the first time I’d had a moment like this with him.

See, we had a strange equation, my boss and I. In the office, he’d often call me a pain in the neck—openly, and with that manager-smirk that says “you’re annoying, but you’re not wrong.”

I was operations.
In his past jobs, the sales and ops teams had the chemistry of oil and water, with added sarcasm.

But here? The sales guys treated me with a weird level of mutual respect.

No fiery emails. No eye-rolls in meetings. Not even a fake cough when I walked by.

They didn’t even blame me for delivery delays. Once, one of them asked me how my weekend was. Without sarcasm.

My boss found it all very unsettling. Like someone had rebooted office politics in airplane mode.

But on our weekly client drives, it was a different story. That’s when we were just two guys in a car, talking about everything from vintage rock to sailing knots.

He once told me about a neck surgery he had, after which he lost sensation in the back of his neck. “I can’t feel the wind anymore,” he said—not melodramatically, just factually. “When I sail, I used to know the wind even before I saw it. Now I don’t.”

He hadn’t shared that with anyone else in the office. I guess our drives were his windless sea, and I was the first mate who just listened.

Funny thing is, when someone says “Stairway to Heaven,” we usually picture only one direction. But stairways—like work relationships, like laughter, like Robert Plant sightings—go both ways.

Up and down.
Boss and subordinate.
Mockery and respect.
Distance and trust.
Wind and no wind.

We spend so much energy climbing the metaphorical stairs — chasing titles, closing deals, solving crises — that we forget the best stories usually happen on the landings.
Where someone yells your name just to say they spoke to Robert Plant.
Where your boss confesses he can’t feel the wind anymore.
Where rock music, sailing stories, and mutual mischief create a brief moment of magic.

And let’s face it — that’s the real heaven.
The rest is just the stairway.