How naîve I was. How young and foolish to think that such a thing as the unhappy iPod face was a real problem and that the occasional freeze was a serious cause for concern. How small-minded was I to think that that was the limit of things that could go wrong with my iPod! How magnificantly insignificant were the boundaries of my mind, to conceive that the worst that things could get was unhappy 'pod! I was like a blind man, but in recent months my eyes have really been awakened to the vast possibilities available to the really demanding iPod-breakage connoisseur.
For example, in the last few weeks, I have encountered the following scampish little errors occuring in my little white box o'joy: All of the buttons seem to have changed their functions to "go back". Therefore, pressing the 'menu' button repeated the song. Pressing 'play' repeated the song - if no song was selected, then no song played. Pressing 'pause' repeated the song. Pressing 'go back a song' did nothing as that button for some reason is permanently stuck down. However, the buttons also occasionally did what they were supposed to do, but only if you jabbed them really really hard and repeatedly with one finger. Meanwhile, this would make the songs skip backwards repeatedly.
Therefore, if you were on the playlist 'Hardcore', and wished to change to, for example, the smooth funky-rock-beats of 'Cake', it would be neccesary to press menu like five times. During these five times, the iPod would skip back five songs. Therefore, before you get to hear "Comfort Eagle", you'd have to listen to the starting beats of, for example, "Hardcore Heaven (Rat Pack & Shimano Remix)", "Funk D'Hardcore (K-Komplex Special Bonkers Edit)", "SMD#1-[Sparky & Sytronik Remix]", "SMD#2-[Vibe & Hattrixx Remix]", and even "SMD#4-[Alistair Storm Remix]" (don't have SMD#3, unfortunately, so I couldn't tell you how good it is). Of course, this is assuming that the iPod did not freeze up at, say, the beginning notes of any of those songs, the termerity of pressing a button, or halfway though changing a menu. Therefore the chance of actually changing a song successfully is as low as, I would say, one in five. This is a lot of effort and stress, just to get to listen to an admittedly not very good band. It is also quite difficult to do with one hand while driving down a dark road at forty mph, avoiding foxes and old ladies and old lady foxes.
Of course, that isn't the whole story. When an iPod usually freezes, all that it is necessary to do is to hold menu and centre button to reset it. As has already been discussed, these buttons weren't really in the most helpful of moods and that tends to do very little/nothing. Therefore, the only thing left to do was to leave the iPod alone in my pocket until it decided it wanted to be nice, something that could take hours or EVEN DAYS. However, something I discovered after a few week's worrying - essentially, banging the iPod against a hard surface (brick wall, floor, forehead of mongoloid) a few times tended to kick start the motherboard or the magic elves or tiny orchestra or whatever inside and reawaken the magical iPod powers. I could tell this by holding the 'pod up to my ear and listening to what was going on. If the iPod was making a high pitched screaming/siren alert sound, then it was not working and needed an extra couple of kickstarting bangs. If it was whirring or silent, then all was good inside and it should reawaken for at least another few songs presently.
This was how I lived my life, from song to song, always grateful when a song played and didn't freeze up halfway through (something that was becoming more and more of a daily occurence). To be honest, I was getting upset. This iPod had been my friend and companion for more than a year now - surely SURELY it wasn't going to keep freezing up on me, not playing music, and, in reality, not letting me understand what was going on within its seemingly pristine shell? This was upsetting - my old friend was making me feel like a villain for trying to listen to its sweet music. With every bang against a wall, I felt like myPod and I were drifting further apart, and I felt more and more frustrated because I just could not understand WHY. I suppose I was not a perfect iPod listener - I dropped it a few times and my awesome trick of juggling it in the air probably didn't do the motherboard much good - but I treated it with real love and respect and thought that we were in with it for the long run. So why was it treating me so shabbily? Why was my iPod not letting me understand what was going on?
I tell you, my iPod caused me some sleepless nights.
Eventually, I thought to myself - this can't go on. This iPod is gearing up to completely break down on me any day soon. I should initiate the first move, just to figure out what's going on and see if I can prevent it. So I tried to prise open the case. In doing so I dropped it and the case came open and I think something disconnected because now the 'hold' switch is stuck on 'on', and so I'm not even allowed inside the pod at all, something which was (and is) causing me some real distress. I decided that things had come to a head. I had to bite the bullet and just ask the questions that needed to be asked. So I did.
"iPod", I asked tenderly, "Do you even want to be my mp3 player any more? I think that if you have had enough of this relationship - which you clearly have judging by the way that you are acting - you should just tell me now. It will save us both a lot of heartache down the line."
The iPod didn't really say anything. It kind of sat there whirring to itself. Then it started playing a song. However when I plugged some earphones in, no music came out. This was distressing. Were we really not communicating at all? I decided that the iPod had probably had enough of me. I had certainly had enough heartache because of it, so we decided to part ways. I put it in a drawer and went to Argos and got a new one, because I feel that I have earnt it after all the misery and worry caused by the last one.
But as I unwrapped my new friend, fears started to sprout. They germinatd in my belly, unfurled up my throat before flowering in my brain and dropping worry-pollen into my eyes. I blinked a few times. What was I doing? Why was I abandoning my old companion? Just because it was unable to let me inside, because it couldn't express its feelings, because there were things that it felt it was unable to share with me... was that a reason to simply dispose of it, to throw it away into the wheelie bin of my existence? The times when I had felt that things between me and the iPod were over had been innumerable, but every time it has amazed and re-energised me by doing something amazing - playing the entire Pink Floyd album in order, for example, or working perfectly for an entire drive to Dorney Lake, or beating up a mugger, or doing something equally excellent that made me thank the Lord that I had not gotten rid of it.
So what to do? Embrace the new shallow flashiness of my new 'video' iPod, or somehow manage to patch things up and go back to the model that I know and love, no matter how hard and bumpy that might be? What do I do??????
This is a difficult decision.
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In conclusion, my girlfriend and I slightly kind of split up a bit recently. Some of this post may have been analagous.
The bit about getting a newer model from Argos wasn't.
