Friday, November 20, 2009
riPod
Story time. Since I moved back to the UK I have been doing most of my sleeping in an outdoor wooden house with all the creature comforts of a regular home but, as I discovered yesterday, with the added feature of a tiny hole in the ceiling. With the relatively good weather we had been enjoying up until now I had failed to notice this little crevice, let alone appreciate the implications of it being there. That was until I woke up this morning and discovered my iPod swimming in a small pool of cold water formed from the night's rainwater finding its way into a recess on the surface of a stuffed envelope that I hadn't thrown out but had instead left lying idle on a cabinet near to my bed - an all too common problem, no doubt. Needless to say, the device is not with us anymore, its cold, damp body having resisted various means of resuscitation. It now lies in a drawer with the only remaining hope coming from the same mysterious bullshit force that makes dead Transformers come back to life in Michael Bay films. Perhaps there is plot convenience in my iPod returning. The real kicker is that had I left the thing even a few millimetres in any direction away from its soon to be watery grave then it wouldn't have perished in such a stupid, wasteful manner and I wouldn't be contemplating going back to the cassette recorder that I had been content with less than two years ago but will now just looks like a plastic box of cogs waiting to chew up my tapes and piss me off.
Much like the deaths in the Final Destination films the circumstances surrounding the deceased were at once implausible but also predictable, with the foreshadowing coming from a particularly bad year for my headphones. Being a tall man with a long stride and quick pace, prone to the odd bout of heavy-handedness, I have always had a pretty destructive relationship with headphones, so much so that for reasons that not even I can account for I have been storing up expired pairs of them throughout the year. Here, hopefully to prove a point beyond my mental issues and attachment to junk, is a fairly complete roll call of the recent dead:
This monstrosity sums up my thrifty attitude quite nicely. Note the different heads, the adaptor, the cellotape and the point where an earpiece has very obviously been snipped off. That's right, two half broken sets of headphones have been shunted together here into one functional construction.
A close up so you can really take in the cellotape
I don't know if it's just me, but the three pairs of standard iPod headphones I have worked through have all developed the same problem - as time went by the volume level from the earpieces shrunk to ridiculous non-levels of non-noise, requiring me to turn the volume up full blast. Yet music would still pump out of the holes on the external side, allowing the mums and kids on the bus and metro to enjoy the Marilyn Manson and Slipknot songs that I was supposed to be listening to, and with far greater clarity. The only solution I found to this problem wass to balance the external sides in my ears with the speakers facing out, giving me back my music but making me look like a confused tit in the eyes of the public.
A garish pair of cheap headphones bought for emergency purposes from a street trader in Bogota, Colombia. The construction is appalling but they lasted for three weeks.
Note how the cover on one of the earpieces had come off. Those with eagle eyes might also notice damage from superglue. I always do everything I can for the patient before giving up hope.
A mass grave of some, but certainly not all, of the headphones lost in 2008-2009. Notably absent are the pairs that my dog chewed up and a pair that I chucked in a Madrid dustbin.
My latest pair. They're durable and function well, but are several inches too short for me to use when I want to go for a walk with my iPod. Oh yeah...
Much like the deaths in the Final Destination films the circumstances surrounding the deceased were at once implausible but also predictable, with the foreshadowing coming from a particularly bad year for my headphones. Being a tall man with a long stride and quick pace, prone to the odd bout of heavy-handedness, I have always had a pretty destructive relationship with headphones, so much so that for reasons that not even I can account for I have been storing up expired pairs of them throughout the year. Here, hopefully to prove a point beyond my mental issues and attachment to junk, is a fairly complete roll call of the recent dead:
This monstrosity sums up my thrifty attitude quite nicely. Note the different heads, the adaptor, the cellotape and the point where an earpiece has very obviously been snipped off. That's right, two half broken sets of headphones have been shunted together here into one functional construction.A close up so you can really take in the cellotape
I don't know if it's just me, but the three pairs of standard iPod headphones I have worked through have all developed the same problem - as time went by the volume level from the earpieces shrunk to ridiculous non-levels of non-noise, requiring me to turn the volume up full blast. Yet music would still pump out of the holes on the external side, allowing the mums and kids on the bus and metro to enjoy the Marilyn Manson and Slipknot songs that I was supposed to be listening to, and with far greater clarity. The only solution I found to this problem wass to balance the external sides in my ears with the speakers facing out, giving me back my music but making me look like a confused tit in the eyes of the public.
A garish pair of cheap headphones bought for emergency purposes from a street trader in Bogota, Colombia. The construction is appalling but they lasted for three weeks.
Note how the cover on one of the earpieces had come off. Those with eagle eyes might also notice damage from superglue. I always do everything I can for the patient before giving up hope.A mass grave of some, but certainly not all, of the headphones lost in 2008-2009. Notably absent are the pairs that my dog chewed up and a pair that I chucked in a Madrid dustbin.
My latest pair. They're durable and function well, but are several inches too short for me to use when I want to go for a walk with my iPod. Oh yeah....jpg)
