Oh, the Irony (#1)

My Dear Readers,

I'm an English major, so I spend most of my time analyzing literature, which is one of the reasons I'm an English major in the first place. In class, I feel as if I'm the one who raises her hand and points out the irony in just about everything. You'd be surprised at how much there is out there. With that in mind, I thought why stop at the lives of fictional characters? Why not go a step further and examine the irony in my own life? So, as an intermittent series, I would like to occasionally indulge myself and spend an entry on irony in my life.

The current example of irony that I find placed before me involves my MP3 player. That's right, I don't depend on Apple products for my sense of self-worth. You should envy my defiance, Gentle Reader. If you only knew the sense of liberation.

Anyway, my MP3 player of an unnamed brand has served me well in the year I've had it. It's a life saver on my 45 minute walks to work and all the dead time in between. Lines at the food court just don't seem as long when Bread is whispering sweet nothings in your ear. Recently, however, its been throwing temper tantrums that are really getting on my nerves. I keep reloading the OS (firmware) and drivers and all the other stuff, but every time I do, the problem just keeps getting worse, not to mention the issues it's having with Windows Media Player 11. Sometimes it will give me the silent treatment and freeze in the middle of songs, but mostly it freezes as it's starting up, which is incredibly annoying. I suppose it's not really the silent treatment, because it goes through a series of chromatic beeps which play over and over, but not through the headphones. Eventually the beeping stops, and last week that meant that it would start starting up. This week, however, the beeping will stop and nothing will change. Even when it actually starts up, it doesn't last for long; it will freeze again or reset without shutting down properly. When it does that, it doesn't save what was played during the last session, and it starts with the same song every single time. So I've basically listened to nothing but the Beatles' Help! album for the past two weeks, and I used to like those songs.

Herein comes the irony: as I type this entry, I'm attempting to get my MP3 player to a point where I can reload the firmware . . . again. This entails turning the player on, waiting until the beeps stop, and then taking the battery out and doing it again if it doesn't start up. If you can imagine how frustrating that it, you can appreciate how I am playing Cake on my computer just to drown out those pesky beeps, which I'm actually listening for. The whole point of MP3 players and Walkmans and the like is that you can only hear them through the headphones, right? This is just stupid. And it's not like I don't know anything about computers, either. I'm not a expert or anything, but I know what CPU stands for and I can do some fairly decent HTML programming. And it's not even bulky enough to hurl at anything.

It's times like these that I wish I was dating a Computer Science major.

Regards, best wishes, and firmware,

-Cecily Jane

P.S. I'll accept any help or advice anyone would like to offer.