Well, I'm to the point now where I'm considering plastic surgery. That's where I am right now — because I've spent the last ten days trying to get these miserable earbuds — which Apple actually has the gall to
sell separately — to stay in my ears, and I'm coming round to the view that it simply is not possible. I am making strides with the right ear. I really have that 'bud lodged in there but good, crammed halfway into the cochlea on that right side, and barring some extreme intervention involving a tractor, rope, and a pair or needlenosed pliers, I'm convinced that Earbud R is in there to stay.
The problem is the left side. I just can't get that L to stick. Oh, I've tried everything — peanut butter, epoxy — but no dice. And as someone who likes to listen to music in stereo, I have to say it sucks to play my iPod's 25GB of loaded music into one measly ear.
Maybe I'm doing something wrong here. Maybe all the people I see in the street, strolling along, with earbuds securely placed, are privy to some secret tip I don't know about. Maybe I'm a horrible, horrible freak with a gaping maw of a left ear parked so far beyond the normal limits for
Homo Sapiens sapiens that even Apple Corp., with its significant design resources, could not account for me when they developed these earbuds.
A co-worker of mine described the same problem to me: the right earbud holds its ground just fine, but the left can't stay in place. I observed at a meeting later in the day that she was writing — like I was — with her left hand. I'm wondering now whether southpaws naturally have a larger external ear cavity than their right-handed counterparts. Apple's engineers may or may not have observed this phenomenon in the course of their R&D. At best, there is a market out there for a Left-Handed Earbud Set. At worst, Steve Jobs is a
sinistrophobe.
In any event, I don't see any nonsurgical alternatives right now, and yesterday I consulted with a physician who proposes to take cartilage out of my knee —
who needs it, right? — and graft it into a ridge along the bottom of my left auricle, just above the lobe. The Good Doctor promises that the new "seawall," as he calls it, will hold that left earbud in place through any physical jostling short of a grand mal seizure. "The iPod itself will skip," he declares, "before that baby jumps your left-side ridge."
Now if only the Health Plan would approve the surgery. They're calling it an "elective" procedure, and it could be another six weeks before I get through their appeal process. Jerks.
