L for Listening

July twenty-sixth. I want to state for the record that I have owned my AirPods for several months and have used them without incident. I want that on the table before I tell you what happened this morning.

I put them in before my run playlist. Left ear: nothing. Complete silence, like the earbud was full of cotton. I took it out, blew on it the way you do with a Nintendo cartridge in 2004, put it back. Nothing. I checked the case, green light, fully charged. I went into the Bluetooth settings and toggled everything off and back on, which is the modern equivalent of turning it off and on again and feeling very technically competent for doing so. Nothing. I held the earbud up to the light and examined it as though I had any idea what I was looking for. At some point I accepted that I was going to have to tell someone I had a defective unit and then probably spend forty minutes on a support chat about it.

Forensic analysis, kitchen table, Monday.

It took me twenty minutes, twenty minutes, to rotate the earbud a quarter turn and feel it settle into my ear with the particular click of a thing that has been where it was always supposed to be. The L was pointing forward. The L, which stands for Left, which is the ear it was in. The L that I had apparently been treating as a suggestion.

I stood there in the kitchen for a moment, run playlist starting immediately at full volume, Gerald's vine trailing past the shelf above the stove, everything exactly as it was.

The moment before I figured it out.

I did not call anyone. I did not post anything immediately. I made my cold brew, I went for the run, and I thought about the AirPod the entire way around the block. The funniest part is that there is nothing to learn from this. I will probably do it again.