On the RAZR’s Edge

So I’m walking home last night, and I plug my earphones into my phone, which is a Droid RAZR.

Why don’t you have an iPhone, Jack? Well, the thing is, I’m extremely Apple-loyal, always have been, but I don’t want them to totally run my life. Plus, I had a Verizon account, and they didn’t have the iPhone when I first got a smartphone. And the Droid appeared to be George-Lucas-approved, which appealed to the 8-year-old geek within me. OK, so why didn’t I get a Verizon iPhone when I recently got a new smartphone? Well, I am not crazy about change, and I was accustomed to the Droid at this point, and I used to have a Motorola RAZR flip-phone, so I guess I was feeling a little nostalgic.

But I digress.

I plug the earphones in. It was a new set of V-Moda earphones, replacing the Klipsch earphones that had just died on me. I buy moderately priced earphones. Not the super-cheap ones, and not the ridiculously expensive ones. But since I’m such a music freak, I figure I should spend a little more. Thus the moderately priced earphones. You’d like to think that spending a bit extra on earphones would make them last a bit longer. Not the case. It’s the built-in obsolescence that made this country great. Just like my moderately priced shoes. I used to buy cheap shoes. Then I thought, I’m an adult, I’ll buy moderately priced shoes. And waterproof, because I get grumpy when my socks are wet. But even moderately priced shoes don’t stay waterproof very long. Maybe the very expensive earphones and shoes last longer? I’ll never know.

I plug in the earphones, and launch my MLB At-Bat 12 app. Best $15 I ever spent. I can listen to home or away radio broadcasts of any game. During the day I listen to music or podcasts on my iPod. But at night I switch to the phone and baseball. I like listening to random teams with random announcers. Late games from the coast. It’s incredibly soothing.

Hmm, the sound was coming out of the speaker, not out of the earphones. I wiggled it, just a little bit. A little static. A second or two of the broadcast (A’s vs. Rockies). More static. And then back to the speaker. Son of a…! I pulled the plug out of the jack and reinserted it. Nothing. I rammed it in there, twisting it in. Damnit, damnit, damnit.

Would V-Moda earphones not work on the RAZR? The shape of the plug was a bit different. Did I have to buy yet another pair of moderately priced earphones? Maybe I could buy a cheap pair, just for baseball. But this was a lot to carry, and my pockets were already overburdened. If I’m going to a concert, it means keys, money, phone, iPod, camera, earplugs, spare camera battery, and sometimes glasses. (I know, I know, the phone can fill the music and camera needs. Ah, but not as well, not as well.) If I’m heading out for the day, I now also have a spare multi-hour phone charge. Wearing carpenter shorts, it’s generally okay. Lots of sweet pocket action. Jeans are trickier, even utilizing that weird little pocket in the right-front pocket. Adding spare headphones to the mix? It seemed like it might drive me to madness.

By the time I got home, I had calmed down a little. It would only be during baseball season, April to October. I could wear shorts a lot during that stretch.

Today I found an old pair of earphones lying around and figured I’d test them out tonight. And then I thought, I’ll Google this, see if others are having the same problem. I searched for “Droid razr earphones not working.” Many results came up. I was definitely not alone. I clicked on a Droid forum, because quaintly, in 2012, there is a subset of society that still insists on communicating via messageboards.

Multi-page thread! I read each post, the frustration, the calls to customer service, the visits to the store. And then someone had the answer, plain as day. The next poster tried the fix, and it worked. And so did the next poster. Thanks all around. They’re a supportive bunch.

The culprit? Lint.

The solution? I unfolded a paper clip, just like we used to do to get a stuck disk out of the old Macs. Poked around the inside of the jack with the business end of the clip. Pulled out some lint.

Tested it out. (It’s Thursday, so there are “getaway” day games.) Voilà. Works like a charm.

We truly live in the future, don’t we?