Computer stuff: crappy headphone alert

It's rare that a bit of consumer electronics is wretched enough to inspire a profane diatribe from your humble narrator, but this past week I came across a pair of headphones fit to act as a muse for Lenny Bruce.

The microphone on my previous headset of record, the estimable and long-serving Plantronics Audio 90 Multimedia Stereo Headset, gave out last week. And in today's high tech gaming landscape, typed chat just doesn't fly- it's like trying to hold up your end of a conference call via telegraph, or semaphore, or notes tied to the legs of pigeons.

Driven to a rash act by the goad of instant gratification, I pissed on one of my own cardinal rules and picked up a headset at Best Buy, home not only to a rotating cast of lardass teens camping the Xbox 360 to play Madden but also high prices and limited selection.

It was an immature and foolish act.
And the gods saw fit to punish my willful hubris with the Logitech Precision Gaming Headset. As it was the only headset available that wasn't one of those spidery telemarketer deals, I didn't look too close at it- Logitech makes great mice and keyboards, people like their speakers, how badly could they fuck up something simple like a pair of gaming headphones?

Oh, foolish man!

First, the good news- installation was a snap, and the microphone worked fine.

Alas, those two positives were trampled underfoot by the seething mass of fatal flaws: torturous fit like a wearable Iron Maiden (I gently probed my ears and scalp for wounds after my first experience with them), awful sound quality reminiscent of my first set of Walkman headphones in Jr High, not to mention the clumsy faux futuristic look of them, a balding middle-aged engineer's idea of something with appeal for "the kids".

I mean, you're never going to cut much of a figure in a pair of headphones with a boom mic poking out of the side, but these were so profoundly dorky the wife took time out of her busy crochet schedule to mock them. If you dared wear them to work at the call center the other operators would peck you to death like a sick crow, and you would ascend to the afterlife knowing they were right to do so.

I just don't understand these things.

They're so profoundly fucked it's like they were constructed in some Cthulean dimension with different physical rules than ours...the angles are all wrong, just looking at them makes you uneasy, and the sounds they produce are a grotesque, unholy mockery of human speech.

So I did what I should have done in the first place and ordered another pair of Plantronics from Amazon. They arrived today, and after work I'm going to exorcise the Logitechs from my home, salt the earth, burn sage and have the ground re-consecrated, then hopefully enjoy an evening of chattin' with my pals minus the torment and dismay of the Headphones from Hell.