The trick is being oblivious, so you probably shouldn't read this.
You'll need:
- small ears (optional)
- headphones from a company with a generous warranty policy
- tape
- obliviousness
When I was in high school, a catty girl that I spent a lot of time with told me that I have freakishly small ears. I'd never really considered before that there was a standard size of ear, and that mine failed to live up to such expectations. Despite her best efforts, my ears never became a cause for self-consciousness for me, and I forgot all about this interaction. That is, until my tiny ears set off a chain reaction for which I have just become extremely grateful.
Over a decade after the Great Tiny Ear Revelation, I received from my parents a very thoughtful gift of on-ear headphones, which I'd wanted for some time. They were fancy beyond anything I'd ever experienced in my world of multicolored $9 Panasonic earbuds. But when I put them on my head, they just weren't comfortable.
"Ahem," said my tiny ears in unison. "Forgetting something?"
"Huh?" I asked.
"We're tiny, genius."
"Wait, who is this?"
But my tiny ears were right. These on-ear headphones were threatening to become over-ear headphones, but not quite succeeding. And so it was with great sadness that I returned this thoughtful gift to my parents and went about looking for a suitable replacement.
It wasn't long before I found them: beautiful, big, resonant, and with a shiny wood finish. My tiny ears rejoiced, and all was well.
For about 8 months.
One day, I realized that the right headphone was very quiet. By the time I finished my walk to work, the speaker had stopped working entirely. I tried switching the cables and tapping the headphone, and failing there, I was out of ideas. But then I was told about the company's 1-year warranty on all products! I e-mailed a representative and received a very prompt reply of, "We'll be happy to send you another pair. They have been mailed to you already."
"Should you maybe ask if they want the old ones sent to them?" my conscience asked.
"Uh," I said. "Hey, look, videos of puppies on YouTube." And so the matter was settled.
A week later, I received the headphones. But instead of the luxurious, over-ear beauties to which I'd grown accustomed, they were earbuds: still quite beautiful and made of wood, but nevertheless not what I wanted. I wrote back to the company and told them of their error.
"Oh okay," their e-mail more-or-less read. "We'll be happy to send you another pair. They have been mailed to you already."
Once again, no mention of a return, even on these brand new, unopened earbuds. This time my conscience just shrugged. Even it couldn't find a way in which we were being unfair.
Another week.
Another pair of headphones.
Another few months of auditory bliss.
And then another sudden one-eared musical deafness.
This time I was outside the bounds of the warranty, so I knew that the company would not help me (and after all, had they not done far more than their fair share?). So I finally turned to that last resort: hypothesis testing. Now pay attention, dear reader, because this is where it gets complicated. I unplugged the headphones from my phone and plugged them into a different device. Where they worked perfectly. And so did the old pair. And a string of lower-priced earbuds that I had similarly discarded into the near-impenetrable abyss that we've taken to calling "the electronics drawer."
Now that's how you science!
About two minutes of Googling then told me that the issue was likely to be dust in the jack, and a couple of applications of a thinly rolled up piece of tape, sticky side out, would fix the problem.
I now have three pairs of fully functional headphones for the price of one. Not to mention a tangled heap of countless old headphones, revived from the dead in true Frankenstein style, just in time for Halloween. And all it took was being too lazy to test a hypothesis for a few months.
That and small ears.
