Where Have The Headphones Gone?
If you’ve been on a bus/train/to the gym/grocery store/airport bathroom (no joke, man was in a stall blasting some show about rocks) ever, you’ve been apart of this. Someone listening to music/a podcast/ impeachment hearings/straight phone conversations/death threats/terror plots/screaming/by taking the speaker at the bottom of the phone and jamming it into their ear. Or just holding the phone by their side, and letting the tiny speaker blare into the openness. NOT ONE headphone in sight. Not a strand. Not a bud. Not a wireless. Nothing. Just their tiny speaker, blaring, and the open air. WHERE are the headphones of these people? What happened? Here are some reasons that HUMAN BEINGS who have PHONES (which is a more EXPENSIVE ITEM than headphones) could not have HEADPHONES.
Your Headphones Got Caught On A Child
You’re a good person. You see trash on the ground? You pick it up. You see a woman in trouble? You yell from across the street, ‘Hey miss, are you okay?’ wait for a few seconds for her to respond to you, and when she doesn’t because she’s being beaten mercilessly in the head by a psychotic person wearing only a diaper, you continue on your way. You’re walking down the street one day, headphones in, and you come across a flaming building. People hanging out of the windows. Screaming and crying. You take your phone out to record the whole thing. Not for likes, but to let investigators know EXACTLY what was going on. As you’re doing the lord’s work, recording other people’s misfortunes, a child falls from the building, and crashes directly onto you. As you stand up, brush yourself off, you reach out to the child in need.
‘Hey kid! Are you okay?’
‘AGHHGHG! Ahhhhhh!’
Waiting for a few seconds for an AUDIBLE response and not getting one, because this flaming child has just fallen from a window, you turn your phone to the fire kid writhing in pain on the ground. And this is when you notice that your headphone cords have been sliced in half by flaming kid arm.
‘No! I was listening to a four and a half hour podcast about fishing that for about three and half hours sidetracks to the hosts doing things like ‘Would You Rather?’ and ‘If A Tiger Attacked You What Would You Do?’ while EVERY ONCE IN AWHILE mentioning fishing! Noooooo!’
Now what will you do? Hold a phone in your hand while finishing the last hour of ‘Fishing For Complaints’ through the tiny little speaker while others endure it as well? Although fire children burning through your headphone cord is a decent excuse, it’s still not enough. Buy another pair.
Your Thousand Dollar Phone Is The Only One That Didn’t Come With Headphones
So you’ve bought/leased a new phone. You open the new phone, excited to use the same three apps that you did on the old one but now THIS PHONE has A FEW MORE FEATURES that you will NEVER USE.
‘Hey there’s a feature on here that tells me how to be rich!’
‘You use it?’
‘Not yet. Instagram!’
You open the phone, expecting to find what you always find. A little book that says, ‘Hello, I am phone. If you’ve opened me and don’t know, you must be an idiot or a very smart baby. Here is what I do’ and HEADPHONES. You throw the little booklet aside, and realize, NO HEADPHONES. Not. One. How are you the ugly duckling? Why in the HELL did you not get headphones that are GUARANTEED to us all? Why is your phone the ONLY ONE that doesn’t have them? Do you go back to to the store and find out where they are?
‘I don’t have time to go all the way to the store! I want to listen to something RIGHT NOW!’
That’s fine. Surely you have another pair of headphones from the dozens of sound playing devices you’ve operated over the years?
‘No, I don’t. I got scared of them and burned them all!’
Well… why would you d…
*A door is heard slamming. The faint noise of music playing through a phone speaker is heard.*
… Well… there’s that…
Someone In Your Family Hung Themselves With Headphones
So you come home after a long day at the office. The whole way up to your front door you’re thinking, ‘Man, I wanted to hang myself all day, but thank GOD I’m not home.’ You open the door, and boom! There’s your grandmother. Hanging from a pair of Beats headphones. Slippers falling off of her cold, dead feet. Note attached to her that says ‘I had these noise cancelling headphones on and I actually HEARD A NOISE that wasn’t the SICK beat I was listening to. I can’t go on in this world if even Dr. Dre, of rapper/producer/NWA member fame, can lie to me and the public like this. So I decided to cancel all noise! I can’t hear a thing now! P.S. Turn up the base. Love, GranMommy Mom Mom’
After you untie your grandmother’s dead swinging body from a beam (which is really hard to do with the quality of the Beats by Dre headphones cord), screaming ‘No! GranMommy Mom Mom! But you didn’t even bake one last batch of cookies before you left us! WHY?!’ you decide that you can NEVER AGAIN use headphones. How can you wear something on your head that took the life of a loved one? You can’t. Understandable. What you also can’t do, is listen to anything publicly without them. This is the trade off. Just silent phone games from now on.
You Don’t Know Headphones Have Been Invented
In 1910, you were a blacksmith. You had two pairs of clothes. One dressy, one slightly less dressy but still very dressy based on today’s standards. You ate beans out of a can and avoided being in photos because they’d ‘steal your soul.’ One day while re-shoeing a horse named ‘Pre World War,’ you slip and accidentally jam the shoe into PWW’s ass. ‘Pre World War’ kicks you in the head, sending you flying into a wall. You are rushed to the hospital and fall into a coma. There’s a mix up at the hospital, and instead of people thinking you’re in a coma, they believe you’re dead. You’re supposed to be taken to the morgue, but these men, who just mixed up a person in a coma with a DEAD guy, don’t want to take you ALL THE WAY to the morgue, so they toss you in a freezer and decide they’ll take you there tomorrow. Unfortunately for you, the room the freezer is in is thought to be haunted, and is cemented over. So there you are. In a freezer. Behind cement. 109 years go by, and then a contracting company buys the land the hospital is on to build condos.
‘All right, the contract is signed. Push these disgusting sick people into the street.’
‘What?! But we need time to move thes…’
‘No time! I want lobby furniture and a movie theatre that no one will ever use in an overpriced building NOW! Wrecking balls will be swinging through here in less than an hour. Hurry up!’
People in wheel chairs are pushed into the street. Full hospital beds with patients in them attached to IVs are tossed out of windows to save time.
‘But I was just about to have my beef bro….. Whoa!’
A wrecking ball is thrown into the side of the building, and the freezer you have been in for 109 years flies through the air, crashing hard into an alley. Your ice body rolls out, and for four days you lay there, thawing. You finally come to. Look at all these cars! What is all this noise?! The buildings! The people! You’re in… the future! You walk into the street in a hospital gown. You see everyone with these THINGS attached to their heads. What IS that?! Demons? Aliens? You try to stop someone, but nothing. Everyone is holding SOMETHING in their hands that is ATTACHED TO THEIR HEAD. Scared, alone, unaware why these monsters have attached themselves to people’s heads, you sit on the street, and wait to die.
You Lost Your Headphones
If you lost ALL OF YOUR PANTS would you just walk around without pants?
‘Yeah these are boxer briefs. I lost my pants, okay? What do you want me to do? Buy MORE PANTS? No. BEST I can do is paint my leg.’
Headphones are pants for your music. Your music/podcast/phone call/temple run game needs pants. They are the private parts of your phone, and they need to be covered up by SOMETHING. NOBODY needs to see/hear your phones music/podcast/phone call just swinging in the breeze. BUY more. STEAL more. MAKE more. But Jesus, get some headphones.
Twitter/Instagram @nathanmacintosh