I couldn’t tell if I would get used to looking at people wearing Apple’s new wireless headphones, or AirPods. The first twenty or so times I found myself jerking my head over and wondering why this crazy person was wearing earphones with no cord.
I assume most people wearing headphones in public aren’t actually listening to anything most of the time as opposed to creating a barrier between their aspy brain and the rest of society, but this appeared to me to portray someone who had been so clueless as to have his jig found out, like the illiterate guy in the old timey movies who sits there casually pretending to read a book that he doesn’t know is upside down.
Eventually I realized these headphones were supposed to look like this, and I wondered if it was something I would ever get used to.
I have decided not. I saw a guy at the post office wearing a Google Glass years ago when they first came out. He looked really stupid. And he still would to this day. I’m sure he’s since taken them off as he would the toilet paper attached to his shoe.
The reason these people look stupid is not because I haven’t caught up to the innovation and realize that the wired Apple EarPods I frequently use in public look archaic, as if having a cord attaching your iPod or iPhone to your headphones will look as silly as rocking a monocle or a Migos T-shirt in a few years.
The reason these people look stupid is that they are very visibly using a really shitty product. I had suspected this, but here’s how I found out I was right:
I was in an Uber Pool and the driver picked up some skittish guy who was wearing AirPods. He got into the car and started peppering myself and the driver with unnecessarily chatty banter, starting with “Hey, I didn’t know where you guys were coming from. My phone said the ride was five minutes away, but then you showed up here, and I didn’t know whether to walk to a less busy part of the street so I could get picked up… Wow, pretty hot out today, right?”
Everyone just sort of nodded. The guy was perfectly friendly but frankly if I felt like making small talk with strangers I’d be good at networking and be doing much better in life and would be in an Uber Black as opposed to this dank pool.
So the guy is just yammering on and on in a one-sided conversation and eventually he actually starts talking about his AirPods, how they are a new noise-cancelling model (which I later found out just means they come with shitty rubber ear pieces) and all this.
So he looks at me and says “I guess you still have the old school EarPods, huh?”
He didn’t say this in a shitty way, he just really wanted to talk about Apple products. So I paused whatever gruesome true crime play by play body dismemberment podcast I was listening to and said “Yeah, I tend to lose stuff a lot, so I’m quite sure I would lose those immediately. I actually really like having the cord attached to my phone, it just makes it easier for me. I tried some Bluetooth headphones but I didn’t really like them, I didn’t like having the cord on the back of my neck, and they bounced around too much when I was running. I really am just totally cool with the system of having the cord plugged into my phone, it’s one less thing to worry about.”
The surly driver grunted in agreement with me. The AirPod guy gave me a look like “Ok, suit yourself” and the ride continued for a few minutes until he began fumbling around in his bag and as a pallid look overtook his face, informed both me and the driver that he had lost one of his AirPods. During The Ride.
I looked under my ass and all over the seat and around my feet but didn’t see anything.
If this were a friend of mine I would have said something like “God you’re a fucking idiot” but as it was I just sat there smugly smirking to myself, as we had literally just discussed this problem.
Undeterred, AirPod Guy proudly announced that he had a tracking system on his phone that could locate any of his Apple devices that were missing, as he narrated this process to myself and the driver, “Ok, find my devices, your AirPods are in use, perfect. Now I am just going to activate the Find My AirPods feature…”
He was acting as if having a protocol to find his easily misplaced shitty product somehow trumped the fact that the product was indeed stupid.
From somewhere near our knees a beeping noise began emitting, which was coming from the missing AirPod. He looked thrilled, like some submarine captain who had covered all of his bases.
I wondered how he could be certain that this alarm wasn’t emanating from the one AirPod still in his possession, as they would both have to be within 12 inches of each other, but I didn’t bring it up.
When the driver pulled over to drop him off, AirPod Guy got out of the car and began trying to look underneath the seat and couldn’t find his missing item. He then asked the driver if he could fold the back seats forward, as the beeping clearly indicated at this point that it was somewhere underneath the seat in some inaccessible cranny.
The driver begrudgingly did this, as I got out of the car as well and pretended to look for his stupid AirPod while being kind of pissed at the inconvenience, since I had already told him, in friendly terms, what a stupid product these AirPods were.
Eventually AirPod Guy located the AirPod which was barely visible between the bolted down seat cushion and the frame of the car. Just a little nub sticking out, the size of a Tic Tac.
He debated grabbing for it but professed he was worried that if he couldn’t get a firm grip on it, this might push it all the way under the seat, never to be seen again. He then theorized to the driver that it might be helpful if he had some sort of grabbing claw like they use in extremely intricate situations such as building nano technology or operating on fruit flies.
The driver said, yes, that would be helpful, but I don’t have one, so what do you want to do. I happen to have very large hands and long nimble fingers, so I offered to give it a shot, but AirPod guy simply stubbed his fingers into the AirPod which pushed it all the way under the seat.
At this point he announced that he was “legally blind”, and the driver said he would look for it later but the trip must continue.
AirPod guy, a bead of sweat running down his forehead then said “What if you drove really fast and made a sharp left turn and then slammed on the breaks? That would carry the AirPod forward and to the right, bringing it closer to the passenger side door, and maybe I could grab it then?”
The driver declined and at this point I realized three things: 1) AirPod guy was so hopelessly attached to his stupid AirPods (as I assume many Apple fanboys are) that he was now proposing Fast and Furious action sequences as a last ditch effort of retrieving his missing item, 2) AirPod guy was totally insane (as I assume many AirPod users are), and 3) I am always right.
***
There’s a lesson to be gleaned from this. If you’re a dumbass (meaning the type of person who wears EarPods or supports Trump, or in the case of Rudy Giuliani and Duncan Hunter, both), it’s clear you’re incapable of listening to people who are smarter than you provide you with advice.
I find this infuriating. As Matt Damon’s character in Scorsese’s The Departed once said “Lookit fuckstick, you don’t gotta trust me, just listen to what I’m saying to you.” I feel like saying that all the time.
It’s painfully obvious at this point that Donald Trump is Vladimir Putin’s bitch. As one of the countless sentences thoroughly sourced and printed on the wall, he recently sold out America’s Kurdish allies as a favor to brutal Turkish dictator Recep Erdogan who shares a common interest with Putin in seeing Syria fall under Russian control.
It’s that simple. It’s also quite simple that Apple invented AirPods so people like you would lose them and then have to buy them again.
If you don’t want to wake up that’s cool, I don’t expect you to, but realize you look pretty stupid now and will in the future.
You’re collectively losing your shit.