Satisfaction Guaranteed, or You and Your Money Can Come Back

Let me start with a declaration: Local radio sucks. I'm not telling y'all anything you don't know already. The music selection is second-rate, the deejays could use a personality injection and a subscription to something besides "Us Weekly," and the commercial breaks are interminable, especially at drive time.

For ten years, I used a portable CD player that I had bought for $150 in 1996, and I had a cassette adapter so I could listen to it in my car. It was a bit of a pain and not the optimal solution, but worth it so I wouldn't have to listen to yet another morning drive yukfest about how sleazy Paris Hilton is. Well, last year that CD player finally petered out, so I was left again to the juvenile musings that pass for FM radio these days.

I've envied satellite radio, but with one income in the family, I quickly converted the equipment price and monthly subscription fee into how many gallons of milk that indulgence would pay for and decided against it. Lo and behold, though, my oldest boy got two portable CD players for Christmas, so yippee! I sneaked one out of his room and was back in business.

Last week my Bride took the kids up North to visit my in-laws, and she took both players with her so the two older boys would have something of their own to listen to on the 600-mile trek. That left me with my CDs, yet no player, for the car. Bad times. So I decided to plunge into the Information Age by purchasing an inexpensive MP3 player, something I could use in the car without fumbling through discs or skipping anytime I hit a bump in the road.

I went to The Big Red Dot, looked up and down the rack, and saw a 1GB unit, made by the folks who brought you the Cool Wind-Blown Guy in Sunglasses Listening to High-Quality Cassettes. Hmmmm. Big name, good cassettes if I recall correctly. I didn't know if that would translate to digital media, but at least they're no fly-by-night outfit I've never heard of. $65 later, I entered the Digital Music Age.

I got home, greedily slashed through the packaging, and tried to fire her up. What's this? Nothing on the display. I fumbled to plug in the ear buds (Good heavens, I am NEVER going to be comfortable calling them by that name). It was playing, but the display was blank. I pressed all the buttons. Nothing. Wouldn't even turn off. After reading the manual, I jammed a paper clip into the small hole in one end to do a hard reset, and POP! Up came the song title, running time, etc. Cool!

I bought this particular model because it promised a graphic equalizer, customizable play lists, shuffle, repeat -- the usual MP3 features -- so I pressed the Menu button to find them and play with them. Nothing. I held the Menu button for a few seconds. The unit locked like the brochure said it would. I pushed Menu again and again. No Menu. How was I going to shuffle play? I suppose I could listen to my music in alphabetical order, but that would get kind of old, wouldn't it?

Then I plugged it into the USB port, and the promised graphic showing the battery charging did not appear. This was not good. How could I ever trust that it was fully charged? I decided to leave it plugged into the USB all night long, but come sunrise, the battery indicator had not changed one bit.

I called technical support like all the paperwork begged me to do, and within 10 seconds of telling him my problem -- about two minutes less than the time I spent giving him my age, my zip code and my DNA profile -- he told me to take it back. "Just a minor manufacturing defect. I'm sure you won't have a problem with the next one. Just go get a new one."

So I did. The Big Red Dot refunded my money without any questions, and I stomped back to the same aisle to get another 1GB Cool Windblown Guy with Sunglasses unit. Just one bad apple, that's all, I kept telling myself.

Came home, macheted through all the packaging, and turned it on. Uh-oh. "ISA error," and again, no Menu no matter how many times I pushed the button. I went the extra mile and even downloaded new firmware from the technical support website, something the manual told me not to do unless instructed by technical support. I quickly saw why when the screen went blank and the unit couldn't be turned on again, no matter how hard I jammed that paperclip into it.

So, back to The Big Red Dot a third time. The refund cashier this time around did take the time to smile and ask me if anything was wrong with it. "Oh, yeah!" I said, ready with my diatribe against the Cool Windblown Guy Wearing Sunglasses, but she quickly looked away as if she didn't want to hear chapter and verse from another unsatisfied customer so close to the end of her shift. Refund in hand, I walked out the door and went to The Big Yellow Tag. No offense, Big Red Dot, but I had been burned twice, and that's quite enough for me. I bought a 1GB SanDisk Sansa Express. We're dealing with a hard drive company here, they oughta be able to get this glorified hard drive technology right. Right? And did they? Damn straight.

Now, I have a unit that works. It turns on, and the display works. When I plug it into the USB, it happily exclaims "Charging!" When I press the Menu button, and I can shuffle, I can repeat, I can set play lists, I can even listen to the FM radio through the unit. And this thing is one-third the size of the malfunctioning Cool Windblown Guy in Sunglasses units -- so small, I am sincerely worried about swallowing it accidentally -- and $15 cheaper to boot.

I listed to it on the way home from work today, and I can already feel my blood pressure dropping like George W. Bush's approval ratings. No more used car ads, no more whiskey-soaked junior-high comedy torn straight from the pages of "Playboy Party Jokes," no more Paris, none of that. Now, nothing but my woefully outdated music collection.

Good times at last. Anybody know where I can download "The Best of Bread"?