The little boy in the photo was sitting in front of me when I was travelling back home on the bus. As is apparent from the picture, the kid wasn't all that happy that I took his photo. He was understandably pissed off; the least I could have done was to give him one of those mini boxes of raisins I'm addicted to for all the trouble he went to posing for the shot.

I've been travelling long-distance by buses a lot lately. The one thing I relish on these interminable journeys is listening to tunes my trusty one-year old iPod serves up randomly. A few days ago, I was on the bus with my brother. Being the kind and generous elder brother that I am (ahem!), I offered him the right side - the side I would often share - of the iconic white headphones so he too could enjoy my wonderful collection of music.

Ah, my lovely collection of songs! That reminds me; I love Went With The Count by Simply Waiting. The song uses the right and left channels to great effect, more so if you're hearing it on headphones. You would have one guy singing on the right side of the headphones, followed by another on the left and then the voices sort of merge; it's simply wonderful. It may appear that I've digressed but in due time you shall see that knowledge of this particular song will come in handy as I relate the following:

After bidding each other farewell, my brother and I went our own way to different parts of town. That was when I had the iPod all to myself. Due to this obscure effect I refer to as "bus lag", I didn't notice something was horribly wrong with the headphones until the song, Went With The Count came on. Each time the guy-on-the-right was supposed to sing, I could only hear the guitar chords. Rather stupidly, I transferred the right side of the headphones to my left ear, thinking perhaps that my right ear had gone deaf.

I was about to feel both relieved and worried at the same time; relieved that my right ear was perfectly alright and worried because the right side of the headphones was not working right. It still refused to work after my doing some percussion maintainance (read: banging the headphones). I was pretty sure that the headphones was fine when my brother and I sang along to Dashboard Confessional's Vindicated while on the bus, so it must have gone kaput between the time I was queueing up to buy the LRT ticket and while beating some old lady to a seat on the train (Made-up Alert: I'm always nice to sweet old ladies; all ladies for that matter).

Anyway, my nice brother promised to pay half of what it would take to get me iPod new headphones. Something along the line of "Ceh, how much could a pair of cheap-looking plastic cost?" must have crossed his mind when making the promise. Was he in for a rude awakening!

So, I went to the Apple store yesterday, hoping they could patch up the headphones. The guy behind the counter told me that could be done before my admitting to him that the warranty for my iPod had ended. After that, he motioned me over to the accessories rack with glee and proudly showed me the RM199 iPod headphones that would solve my problem once and for all. The only drawback was that I would be left starving for the next few weeks.

Folks at Apple are extremely smart people; they apply unmatched marketing moxie, make you say "Hey, I want one of that!", give short warranty periods so as to sell extended warranty for more dough and when things go wrong, they have the perfect replacement for you - at a reasonable price of RM200, of course! Bloody RM200 for a pair of headphones? I was undestandably pissed off. Another Apple product? Let's just say it's like a gorgeous girlfriend who's expensive to get and even more so to maintain. Now, that's worth thinking twice about.