Disaster.

I have discovered a fatal flaw in the new iPod Shuffle. As I have already mentioned in a previous post, the headphones that came with my Shuffle must be worn with the Shuffle because they contain the only controls for volume, pausing, skipping tracks, etc. The problem I encountered is that the actual ear buds don’t stay in my ears.

For Christmas, my wonderful friends gave me a couple options to help me with this problem. One, a little connector cable to go between the Shuffle and the headphones. This cable was about 4 inches long and housed the control centre, therefore allowing you to any headphones you wish. Two, an iPod shuffle compatible set of headphones that had the control centre on them, just like the Apple ear buds, except the ear piece is actually shaped to fit comfortably inside a human’s ear.

These options worked spectacularly…for a while. You see, the first time I wore my new headphones was at the airport on my way back to England after Christmas. I was watching a film on my laptop while waiting at the gate (because I got there many hours early due to some crazy man’s terrorist attempt) and the wire from my headphones became awkwardly wrapped around my knee and when I turned slightly I ended  up pulling the cord out from the plug, not totally, but exposing some wires. Now, I tried using electrical tape to mend this when I got back to England but it was at such an angle that the tape didn’t stick or would slide off the affected area. Despite this, the headphones lasted several months (until June) after which point they just flat out stopped working.

Once this happened, I bought the cheapest headphones I could find and attached them to my special connector cable! This worked for about one month until it very tragically fell apart. I don’t really know what happened, but I think because it was such a short cable  it didn’t bend very well and both plugs ended up pulling away from the wire. Regardless, that stopped working as well, leaving me with just a set of headphones and absolutely no control over my Shuffle.

I have been listening to my Shuffle on the alphabetical setting (plays in order rather than shuffling) for the last little while and today I finally got to the end of my 800 songs. And guess what happened after the last song? NOTHING! Nothing happened, it just stopped playing. I 100% thought it would just loop around back to the first song, to something with a number in the title or by an artist that starts with A. But it didn’t, it just stopped. And now with no way to control the Shuffle, I am stuck! And this, my friends, is why the iPod is iFlawed.

I have two ideas. The first is to let my battery drain and recharge it. Several times upon recharging the Shuffle has started playing from the first song. The second is to re-sync my iPod with iTunes and hopefully that will restart the song list. If all attempts fail, at they very least I have a nice  silver brooch.