Nothing Lasts Forever...Or Ten Minutes

There's a fantastic movie called Good Bye Lenin! that I recommend people watch, whether they want to get a feel for life behind the Iron Curtain around the time of the revolutions of '89 or they just want to see an enjoyable film. That being said, there's one part of the movie that I took note of that struck me as rather interesting. One of the characters had the job of a TV repairman, and it made me realize that in America you couldn't get work like that any more. Because in the good ol' U S of A ("that's US, Asshole"), if something breaks, you just go out and buy a replacement--shit's too cheap to begin with, and repairs cost too much.

This is illustrated beautifully by my experience with mp3 players. Being the massive fan of music that I am, it's important that I have access to my music 98% of the time. After a couple of semesters of college in which I would lug basically a briefcase filled with CD's, I decided to digitize my collection and join the technological revolution. Hell, we even had the technological equivalent of wearing the same uniform, since everybody purchased identical-looking iPods at this point. When it's working at peak performance, it's a miracle device--days and days of music at my fingertips with little compromise in sound quality. It made those 11-hour trips across the country much more bearable.

You'll notice I sneaked in the caveat of "peak performance." (Ed. Note: apparently, Firefox doesn't recognize "snuck" as a word, so I've altered the sentence slightly from the original draft) That's because this rarely was the case. There was always some sort of battery or hard drive issue, and the end result was that it created the one instance in human history where it was actually worth-while and cost-effective to have purchased the Extended Warranty. In the end I had to have the player repaired or replaced at least four times. On iPod 5, I was left with a device that only could get charged in a certain unwieldy appliance, and that was when I decided to make a clean break and just dump the motherfucker on Joe. Besides, the warranty was up.


At this point I did some research into getting "anything but an iPod." But at least I had legitimate gripes besides being wary of being a member of the increasingly disturbing Mac cult (OH MY GAWD, THEY'RE ALL SO INTERESTING-LOOKING AND THE COMPANY IS TOTALLY NOT EVIL EVEN THOUGH THEY HAVE RESTRICTIVE DRM MEASURES AND PROTECT THEIR SHIT MORE THAN MOTHERFUCKING FORT KNOX AND THEIR SHIT BREAKS ALL THE TIME). It was then that I decided to go against my better instincts and purchase a Zune. It was the equal or the iPod in many respects, and even had some slight advantages (better headphones, larger screen). And when it was working fine, I enjoyed it very much.

Again with the caveats.

That's because the Zune had the strange problem of losing all battery power after about four hours, when it's supposed to last for 20. The weird part was that the meter would show that it was 3/4 full (which it should have been), but then it would crash and die a fiery fiery death. Sometimes you could resuscitate it ever so slightly so that it could gasp out weakly "Low Battery" to confirm your suspicions, but even that was a "sometimes" deal. So what did I do? I went back to the store, and without any questions, they just handed me a new one (in fact it was an upgrade--I went from 80GB to a 120GB model, and even got a better color (black as opposed to red, which always made me feel kind of fruity in some weird way, though it probably had no basis in fact, and is strange since I'm otherwise perfectly comfortable with my sexuality, etc., but it manifested itself in some strange reason in the color choice of my Zune, even though it was 93% obscured by the case I used)). I figured my problems were solved.

That was until 4 hours of playback later. You could guess what the deal was.

Of course, it doesn't help that the companies make fixing these things impossible on your own. You can't call for specific issues like this, you can't email them, but you CAN look through pages and pages of forum threads which in the end just show you that thousands of people had the same problem as you and were simply ignored (this is true of both Microsoft AND Apple, so suck it Macfolk).

So fuck that noise, I'm getting something else. Dammit, I was going to go crawling back to the iPod.


Luckily I was able to replace the Zune with the iPod at no charge. And hey, no battery issues! But then, strange shit started going down. I'm listening to a song, and then halfway through...wait, why did the next song start? Huh? Five songs later...what? Again, motherfucker?!? Wait, did you just fully crash on me? Don't you fucking dare...ah shit. You just did.

But I could deal with that. Well, at least I was forced to--I'm overseas, and there's no Best Buy I could go to for a replacement. That was until I had my shitty-ass iPod stolen by some soccer hooligans. Yeah, apparently in Europe you can go on a train and even though you're on the right line, you need to get the fuck up and MOVE because your train car is going to split and go into a different direction. Amidst the confusion of not wanting to end up on the train to Moscow, I momentarily left the device on my seat; even though I returned seconds later to go retrieve it, the iPod was gone.

So now I was without a music and I had about 7 weeks left of my crazy EuroTrip, and I was staring into a void of hours of travel without something to protect my freakin' ears. So I bit the bullet and bought myself an iPod in this freaky-deaky land of the Dutch. Hell, I even managed to track one down at a price that was equivalent to one in the US (with the extended warranty kicked in). Maybe I could have better luck with not-shitty US import standards.

And that was the case for a couple of weeks. I enjoyed hours of problem-free iPod performance, as I did everything from ride my bike to work, travel 10 hours by train to Berlin, and um, do laundry (after all, you can't have a wild European Adventure without clean clothes). That is, until I decided to play Solitaire on the damn thing. Apparently that caused my iPod to go all to shit. Now it hates being connected to my computer, and likes to not-play random songs and albums that are otherwise fine (i.e., still play on iTunes). I mean, how can you listen to Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots without "Do You Realize??" How can you lose the ability to listen to "De-Loused in the Comatorium" and "Siamese Dream", the highlights of each band's catalog?!?! Again, fuck that noise.



So now, here I sit, as I first hard-reboot the iPod, then connect it, randomly guess when it's at full power, and then can make any adjustments that are necessary. I'm sure we can't blame all this on the spoils of Capitalism. But it's a helluva place to start.