Have I ever managed to fix anything?

My life seems like an endless series of broken things. I try to fix them, and in the fixing, I destroy them. The latest in this long series is the Sansa Clip.

It was a great little MP3 player until suddenly it wasn’t. It was barely used, practically new, and the headphones started to crackle. They crackled more and more until one day, there was no sound at all. Typical. Most things are crap these days. Nothing lasts.

My lovely Sansa Clip just sat in a bag for a long time, and I carried it around. I thought someday, I would fix it. Or at least try. A few days ago, that time had come. I found out online that this was a common problem – a manufacturing defect – in the Sansa Clip. Inside the unit, the two contacts for the headphone jack simply break free. If you press the headphone jack to the side, you can make contact and get sound back. But as soon as you let go, the sound disappears.

According to what I read, the solution was an easy one. You simply open up the unit and re-solder the contacts. To my surprise, I was able to open up my Sansa Clip without destroying it. I saw that, exactly like all the others, the two contacts had broken loose. I picked up a small soldering iron and some solder from a hardware store and set to work.

In a very short time, I had reduced the inside of my MP3 player to a blackened and melted mess. In trying to fix it, I had destroyed it completely. I don’t know how other people managed to solder it and fix it. The space around the contacts was tiny, and the contacts were fragile. By the time I had applied enough heat to melt the solder, I had melted the whole area around the contacts. The metal simply melded with the plastic, and it was over. Done. Finished. Another piece of fragile technology in the garbage.

Tags: Sansa, Sansa Clip