Wired earphones and 2023!

Heyo, readers! A bit of a chuckle as we look at wired earphones here in prison.

I am, at the moment, wearing a pair of earbuds that came issued with our prison tablets. These are firmly wedged in my ears, and turned up as loud as this tablet gets. The audio is about as loud to me as two people having a quiet conversation somewhere, which is to say it's pretty quiet.

It, strangely, isn't what I want to point out with laughter. Instead, it's the 3.5mm plug (if you grew up in the 80s and 90s, it's what we used to call 1/8") design that is designed for intentional failure.

Failure, defined:

A mental image for you (because I am not drawing hands today if I can help it!):
I am holding a 7" tablet in landscape mode, because the mail app I use to write here only allows this orientation. I have earbuds in, listening to the five songs I have, and the jack is plugged in on the right side of the tablet, right where a person needs to grip the thing to type on the on-screen keyboard. The plug is a straight plug, not angled 90°, and my hand is trying not to press the wires.

This last bit is a design failure, seemingly intentioned to cause the earbuds to fail and drive purchases of other earbuds or earphones: enough stress where the stress relief starts, and the internal wiring will break.

It isn't as if we have soldering irons, solder, heat shrink tubing, and spare parts to fix these on our own, even if it would be a nice thing to train a few inmates on doing, so that even in prison, we are able to reuse, reduce, recycle instead of feeding things to the waste stream.
(oh hey, look, soldering! useful skill to acquire!)

While I bemoan the lack of my Bluetooth hearing instruments, my Bluetooth bone conduction headphones, and the Bluetooth speaker I wore around my neck when I was cycling or scootering, I surmise quite fairly there is a reason prison disallows Bluetooth in the name of security, and I expect throwing 768 Bluetooth radios in close proximity might cause other problems as well. :)

This said: I get prisons have a budget. It would be feasible, however, to spend a few cents more per unit on earbuds that last a bit longer when buying them in bulk. If inmates can listen to the radio, to podcasts that further intelligent thinking, to music they enjoy instead of having more time for drama, it would perhaps make a CO's day to just come in, say hi, check up on us and maybe even have intelligent discussions with us who live behind the wires instead of having to deal with another fist fight in a crazy dorm.

What's the build quality like on these buds?

I would swear I have seen earbuds like these in the Dollar Tree before the price hike. They feel like they will break while Passing Breeze is playing, with brittle plastics all over. These are likely something anyone can order on Alibaba with a Minimum Order Quantity (MOQ) of 500, and cost something like 29¢ US each.

But, I digress. I'll sit here and quietly contemplate my breathing and listen to a rendition of Adagio for Strings.

As for you? Keep breathing. Keep questioning. Keep questing.
Ask what right you can do, and what wrong you can right. Stay hydrated and be well. Thanks for reading!