02.27.06
A few inches short of a self-lobotomy
Although I absolutely adore my Shure E3c earbuds, I had a bit of a tragedy with them last Thursday after working out at the company gym. I accidentally closed one of the buds in the locker door when I went to take my shower, and didn’t realize until I returned. I reassembled the earbud, thinking everything was fine, so I placed it back into my ear so that I could finish listening to the Feast of Fools podcast, like I do each and every evening.
When I returned to my desk, a co-worker approached me and started talking to me. Out of politeness, I went to remove the earbud from my ear, and it was stuck deep in my ear canal. Not the foam cover, but the entire plastic tip of the earbud itself. This, in fact, had already happened to me once before when I was working at Tommy Hilfiger in New York City. The rubber tip of these same earbuds had come out in my ear, and I was terrified that I would have to go to the emergency room to have it removed. Thankfully, the first aid kit had a pair of plastic emergency tweezers, which saved the day. Today at Yahoo!, no such luck. Not only do I not know where the first aid kit is, but I really didn’t feel like traipsing around building B to find it.
Seeing that I was struggling, the aforementioned co-worker simply walked away. I proceeded to try to pry them out wiith a pair of scissors, which in retrospect was not the smartest idea. Only later was my mind filled with images of falling on said scissors and having them penetrate my brain. Later I realized that I could have been like Phineas Gage, who had his frontal lobe pierced by a railroad spike in the 1800s, lived to tell about it, and was never quite the same. He went from being a nice, socially capable guy, to being an irritable jerk. I wonder if having scissors going through my head would have improved my personality.
Anyway, I cut the inside of my ear, and after it was clear that the scissors wouldn’t be of much help, I decided that I should try to dislodge the earbud a different way: using the handle of a plastic spoon. After about 10 minutes of fighting it, I finally got the bloody earbud piece out of my ear, letting out a huge sigh of relief.
The next day, I resassembled my earbuds using Krazy Glue, and as far as I can tell, they are as good as new, although my psychological state may be a little damaged from the experience.