The death of 80GB's

My ipod stopped working. Just like that, out of the blue, my little, black, square friend has died. Perhaps to say "just like that" is....well, is a lie. Recently the rainy season started here which means that that rain comes from all angles at any time of the day. Take this weekend for instance, the rain started early Saturday morning and stopped about half an hour ago. It's Monday morning here in Korea at the moment. Anyways, back to my ipod, it is dead and I am sad. Perfect timing of course, I'm about to travel around a bit and portable music would have been greatly appreciated. So, how is the death of this black rectangle not really out of the blue? Well, it might even be my fault, kind of.

I was teaching university students last week and the rain came a calling. To call it rain is actually an understatement, imagine falling into a body of water with pockets of air in it and that's pretty much what I experiencing. My ipod was in my pocket and it got a little bit wet since the water soaked through my dress pants and soaked me to the bones. After the rain subsided, I took out my ipod to see what the damage was and that familiar glow lit up when I hit play. No harm no foul right? Wrong. I became Mr. Butterfingers and proceeded to accidentally drop my ipod. As it feel from my hands I could see the world in slow motion. I quickly reached out in a futile attempt to grab it before it hit the ground. Even though I'm 33 I still have quick reflexes so I did manage to make contact with my ipod...unfortunately I clumsily knocked it higher into the air, above my head, which only gave me more time to watch it fall back to earth. It hit the ground extremely hard, but luck for me the blow was cushioned some by the very deep puddle of water that had formed due to the perfect storm I was just caught in. To add insult to injury, the splash my ipod made as it took a swan into the abyss, was so powerful a drop of puddle water made it all the way into my mouth, which of course was open.

So not only did I have to witness the death of my ipod, I will probably catch some strange water-born disease that 1 in 100,000,000 people get because it only comes from being exposed to Korean rain water that has been mixed with brick and ipod matter.

Of course, complaining about ipod dying when there are thousands of displaced Chinese due to a recent earthquake is kind of silly. Being annoyed that I won't have portable sounds for a while when people are losing their homes, their jobs and their souls is absurd...right? But damn I miss my music!