Another chapter in the (apparently endless) iPod saga

Those of you who have been around a while know I have, um, issues with iPods. Or, perhaps more specifically, iPods seem to have issues with me. Let’s take a moment to review my rather checkered iPod past, shall we?

I joined the clan of the Apple faithful in August of 2006. Beloved bought me a 1G iPod nano, and I loved the heck out of the little dickens. Perhaps I loved it a little too much, though, because it died an untimely death a mere two and a half weeks later.

The replacement iPod lasted a whole five months before it seized up and died in the midst of transfering a play list from my computer one day. Less than a year old, though, it was replaced under Apple’s one-year warranty protection plan.

The new iPod, shipped straight from Apple, died before I even opened the box. It arrived in a pre-deceased condition. Seriously!

So, if you’re keeping score, that’s four iPods in six months. The next one lived a good life. A whole eight months went by before I, um, laundered it to death in the fall of 2007.

And because the universe was running out of new and innovative ways to kill my iPod(s), the latest replacement was simply stolen out of my unlocked van one night almost exactly a year ago.

I replaced it, though, and I’ve come to be rather fond of this latest lucky seventh iPod, the one that has been with me the longest. Perhaps that’s why of all the trauma and hassle resulting from the accident on Thursday, the loss of this last iPod was the bitterest pill to swallow.

I don’t usually leave my iPod in the van. I’d had it at the gym, as usual, on Wednesday, was distracted leaving the van and left it lying on the seat. Later in the day, I stuffed it into the glove box, but the cord from the earphones was dangling out. Thursday before work, I stopped to get something out of the van on my way to the bus, and noticed the dangling cord. “I should put that in the house,” I thought, but knew I was running late for the bus. “Okay, I’ll just stuff the cord into the glove box and get it later. It’ll be fine.”

Famous last words.

About 10 hours later, the front corner of the van closest to the glove compartment crumpled into a heap shortly before being engulfed in flames, and then throughly soaked by the firefighters’ hose. If my iPods can’t survive a data transfer, there was no way it could have possibly survived this:

(I couldn’t resist this last picture when we went to the impound lot to retrieve any personal belongings from the van yesterday. You know, it’s amazing what minutaie collects in your car. Umbrellas, sippy cups, CDs, kids’ toys and books, a soother (I left that behind), a case of club soda… it was both traumatic and cathartic to pick through the charred ruins of my former van, collecting these little bits of normalcy. It was a very surreal moment, especially because the van was in the exact condition it was in at the moment of impact — the key still in the ignition, the windows were still open, because it was a warm and glorious summer afternoon. That more than anything brought me immediately back to the crash…)

When I first looked through the open window, after I took in the still-inflated air bags, I noticed the glove compartment was open. “For chrissake,” I thought. “Bad enough I’ve got to deal with everything else, but someone’s been rifling through the van looking for anything worth stealing.” It’s a secure yard, though, and it turns out the glove box just popped open from the impact.

We’d had the van for nearly a year when we realized that it actually has two glove compartments, one above the other. The second one, the less obvious one, is where I had stashed my iPod. After looking at the sodden remains of my owner’s manual in the lower glove compartment (I left it behind, but the magpie in me kept a little Dodge Ram emblem that had popped off of something), I had little hope that there would be anything left of the iPod. I wasn’t even sure if I’d be able to open the glove compartment, looking at the state of the rest of that corner of the van.

It opened easily, though, and I was surprised to see very little evidence of the fire inside the glove compartment. I reached in and pulled out the iPod, still in it’s Roots neoprene case and still attached to the headphones. When the headphones actually dripped as I pulled them out, so saturated was the foam padding on the ear pieces, my heart sank. I’d been holding out against hope, I think, without even realizing it. I threw the whole thing into the box with the umbrellas and the sippy cups, and threw them into the back of the car.

A few minutes later, I pulled it out to show Beloved. I reached into the neoprene case, and could feel the dampness through the neoprene. I peered at the LED display in the bright sunlight, and to my shock, the display was working. I must have hit the clickwheel with my thumb as I was pulling it out. I was so surprised, I actually turned it off again, and then back on. I clicked a few times, and cranked the click wheel to turn up the volume, and damn if Headley wasn’t suddenly blasting out of the sodden headphones.

Talk about lucky number seven. My iPod survived!

Author: DaniGirl

Canadian. storyteller, photographer, mom to 3. Professional dilettante. View all posts by DaniGirl