iPhone fixed!
When the headphone jack on my iPhone stopped allowing plugs to click into place I figured there was some tiny piece of metal that had either broken off or gotten stuck somewhere down inside the hole. After putting off a visit to one of the Apple Retail stores in the area I finally made an appointment for Monday evening so that I could swing by on my way home from work. Imagine how silly I felt when the employee (or “Genius”, if you prefer) shone his tiny LED keychain flashlight down into the opening only to declare, “there’s a big piece of lint in there!”
It all began to make sense. The first time I noticed there was a problem was in the pitch black of the bedroom after not being able to fall asleep. Thinking I’d listen to a podcast or two while laying in bed, I grabbed the phone from the headboard and pushed the headphones into place. Or at least I made the attempt. There must have been a piece of pocket lint just inside the headphone jack which was promptly shoved further in and compacted by my fumbling nocturnal efforts.
After removing the lint we had to test that everything was working properly. Since I didn’t have any headphones with me the Genius pulled out his own personal pair to test with and double-tapped the home button to play the most recent audio file. He gave a very abrupt “Uh… it’s working.” and stopped playing the file. It was only later that I found out that the file that had started playing was an old episode of The Dawn and Drew Show podcast, the intro to which sounds like this. I can only imagine what that poor guy was thinking.
Lesson learned: always shine a light into a problematic hole and assess the situation.
In other news, I can’t wait for this kind of weather to return:
Taken while driving back to St. Louis on I-70 E.