My own stupidity

Yes, I know I should probably be heading to bed right now, not writing a blog for the 7 or 8 of you even bother to read it. But this is a post about my own stupidity, so it only makes sense that I deprive myself of sleep. Anyway, I can sleep on the plane...oh yeah, I'm flying out to Pittsburgh again, but this time it's to bring Deirdre back here for good! Well, at least until we both move to SoCal. Yeah, I know, you're jealous, and you should be ;-)

Actually, after I tell you my little tale of stupidity you probably won't be all the jealous of me and you may even feel some pity for Deirdre and her being stuck with me. But forget that, let's get onto the point.

How many of you know about in-ear headphones? I'm not talking about the horribly uncomfortable, hard plastic, cheap-ass ear-buds that come with most music players. I'm talking about the ones that are specifically designed to actually fit into your ear canal and sit tightly in there; they come with various sizes of soft plastic cap to fit comfortably. Well, if you haven't they are really nice little sound systems. By sitting so close to your eardrum they don't need to put out a lot of sound to seem loud. But better still, you don't need to crank them up because they act as earplugs. By blocking out the outside noise you don't have to play music ridiculously loud to hear it in noisy environments.

Anyway, these earphones fit very snuggly into your ear and they feel pretty comfortable. Well sometimes I'm prone to fiddle with thing, absentmindedly and without regard to any risk. So this afternoon I was sitting at my desk, listening to music and playing with the earphones. The next thing I realized the sound went dead in my left ear, but it felt that the earphone was still in place? Nope, it wasn't in place, I had actually managed to pull the sound system out...leaving behind the soft plastic cap...lodged in my ear.

So of course I don't want to panic, because that will never make things better. I just need to get the cap out, but I can't grab onto any part of it.

Ah! I have a pair of tweezers on my mini-leatherman, that should work. Nope, after trying to get a grip without pushing it further in I learned that the plastic is designed not to stick at all to metal, but will stick to flesh like super glue.

I could ask someone to get it out for me...but that's just kind of lame. And which of the people do I ask to get it out? Some would surely insult and harass me about it for ages to come, others I'm not sure I want to try and trust them with getting something out of my ear.

Fortunately I found that I was able to deform it enough and rotate it sideways so that I could pry the damn thing out. What can I say, I''m just a danger to myself at times.