Earphone Trouble

Through the course of my life, I have had many different pairs of headphones and earphones (there is a difference! Headphones go on the out side of ears and around your head and earphones and earbuds are the little seashell things that go into your ear.). My first pair I owned was with my CD player walkman. They were the cool kind that went behind your head instead of over it. I had those for a couple of years until I received my first iPod (speaking about iPods, the reason that I ended up going with an iPod was because of the itunes store. My family has iPod so if I wanted to share songs I needed to have an iPod.). Then I had the classic apple ear phones. While I was using those ones, a baseball or something caused one of the mini speakers to play music about half volume. It started to get worse and before you knew it I then had only half of a pair of earphones (so I guess that you could say I had an earphone). I used that earphone for about a month until I couldn’t take it any more. I went to ebay to look at some me’m-so-cool-because-I-have-apple-earphones. I found some for about five bucks that looked like the real deal. I asked my dad for his money spending card (also know as a credit card, dept racker upper, horrid slicer of death, etc.) so I could buy it but my dad insisted in him, himself, and he to put it in to see if I wasn’t a crazy terrorist who would steal his identity and sell it to target. He thought it looked ok so he bought four pairs instead of one. When they arrived I noticed that the stamps had come from Hong Kong (just for the record, it is not very hard at all to notice that the stamps came from somewhere else. But with my quick eye I saw that the return address said Hong Kong). Hmmm, oh well. Let’s just open it up so I can get the goodness of my music in me. When I open up the package I realize that these aren’t what the picture showed. These are cheep copy cat scams from a company that thought that they could just ignore international copy right. They are pathetically cheep. I, in my ignorance to the fact that I could have just returned them, open the earphones and check them out. The first pair lasted about a week. The second one lasted about 4 times that long (a month). The third lasted a huge time of two weeks. The last pair I was very careful with. They lasted a whole month and a half! I totally lost all my trust in ebay. I was also very tired of hoaxes so I asked my mother to by a ten dollar set of earphones the next time she went to target. She came home with a set of skull candy earphones. I was so glad that I had two working speakers that I didn’t think about criticizing them for along time. But after a while I sort of got tired of being over optimistic. Let me explain a little thing about these ear phones that make them annoying. The parts of the earphones that you put in your ear are practically suction cups. Thus, when ever one such as I would put these little darned do-hickies in your ear you have the feeling that you are either going up very fast (lot of pressure to the fragile little thing we call an ear drum) or down very fast (The little fragile thing referred to before called an ear drum is being pulled out of your head through ear very painfully). So I grew to hate these little boogers. But then I lost my iPod so I didn’t use them for about two months. After that it was a few weeks before Christmas. I received three entire pairs of earphone from that wonderful and very delightful day. I also received an iPod so I got another set of classic apple brand name I’m-so-cool-because-I-have-iPod-earphones. But I also received two of my now favorite pairs of earphones. These headphones are made by JVC and are called gummy (by the way I believe it is spelled gummy and not the more proper way of Gummy). I had all the earphones I needed for my life. But then something else happened. My family when to the capital of our proud nation (yep you guessed it, Washington D.C.). One day while we were on this wondrous vacation we stopped in the old post office to have lunch. While my family was off getting their food, I found my way into a little electronic shop. Ninety seconds and twenty bucks later I walked out in a daze. When I sat down I asked my self two questions: how did that salesman get me to buy this stuff, and what did I buy. I found out sitting there two minutes after I had purchased it what I had purchased (by the way, Chinese people that talk really fast can be very persuasive salesman just incase you wanted to start a company or anything like that.) I had ended up buying a pair of headphones, a pair of earphones, a portable speaker system, a headphone splitter, and a comb that looks like a knife (there may have been more but I don’t remember). I enjoyed my new headphones for a while (they were the type that have great sound and also have very comfortable ear flap things). But then I noticed something that almost made me want to run and find a fridge that I could collapse in hypothermia in. There was a warning that said something like this: “Warning: handling the cord of this product will expose you to lead, which in the State of California has been found to cause cancer or other reproductive harm. Wash hands after use.” This is what it said in my head: “Warning: Because you were a dweeb and purchased this, if you ever try to have kids you will not be able to. If you are lucky enough to have kids the will be vegetables. That is if the cancer doesn’t kill you first.” Does that throw any flags in your head? It did mine. So I wrapped the cord with tape. That was weird and it also had holes all over it. So I took it apart to see if I could attach a different cord to it. Warning: If you don’t want to be very confused don’t open a pair of head phones. Story made short: The choice was to solder wires that I didn’t even know it they would work to do something else. I chose to wrap the cord with electrical tape so not only did it look somewhat normal, but it also couldn’t get the lead to me. After this was all done my dad asked me why I was doing it. I told him about the warning. He said not to worry about it because it there had been enough lead to hurt you then it would be off the market. So that’s the end of my story at the moment because the last thing happened yesterday. Now I get to see what happens next.