I have always been satisfied with the things I have bought at American Science and Surplus. A trip there has been one of the best parts of visiting my grandma for years. 

But apparently you should not trust the website. 

A couple summers ago, I got myself a pair of ten-dollar headphones at ASS. Despite being so cheap, they were the best headphones I had ever had in terms of sound quality and within the top five in how they felt. (My parents say it's because they haven't ever gone out and bought good headphones for me and my sisters, but I've borrowed my mom's headphones, supposedly better quality than the ones I've had through the years, at times, and there's always been something wrong with them. And the really good headphones at my Hogwarts-equivalent school seem to just be more padded and probably more soundly built than my ASS headphones, not any better in terms of sound quality.) 

So I use those headphones for a while, and eventually they started falling apart. They still worked just fine, the plastic frame was just starting to come apart in places. No problem; I had silver-and-gold duct tape and could make repairs that looked like just a stylistic choice. 

So I used them for a while longer, and eventually they stopped connecting consistently with the headphone plug on my laptop, at least until they started consistently only playing the sound in one ear. They still worked just fine with my sister's laptops and my dad's, so I knew it was a problem with the computer not the headphones. And using a converter to attach them to a USB port instead fixed it, though it took a while to find the right converter. 

Then they died again and stopped working at all in the ear that hadn't interacted right through the headphone plug. So I took them apart and found a couple of bends in the internal wire  that I knew hadn't been there before. One of them had stretched the fabric covering the wire until it ripped, and I just had to cut the rest of the cloth in that spot and straighten it out. But the other bends, which were too far away and through too much to take advantage of the same rip, I wound up cutting through the wire itself as well. And I found that the wire had some flattened spots that were probably the problem. 

Now, if I had left it with just that one cut through the wire, the headphones could probably have been repaired eventually. Maybe they still can, but it would be a lot harder. After getting my mom to order some new headphones from the ASS website, I cut out as much of the internal wire as I could because in it's broken state it was not allowing me to put the headphones back together so I could keep them looking whole. 

And now the headphones have arrived, and they are not what I ordered. The picture on the website showed the same headphones I got previously, but what arrived is very different. And to top it all off, if I plug them into my computer, whether with or without the converter, they do. not. work. in. one. ear. If I plug them into a different computer, they work just fine. I could have sworn that I had tested my earphones with a different computer before cutting up the wire, but perhaps I did not, and they would have been just fine if I wasn't trying to use them with my obviously broken laptop. That's just the icing on the cake! erhgx
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