These're the headphones that come with your iPhone or iPod. (iPhone has a microphone on it to make phone calls, which aren't in the iPod version.) That part with the + and - obviously is the volume control, but that space in between the two is actually a third button. Three years ago when I got my first iPod I played around with it and discovered when you pressed the middle button once it stopped or started the music and pressing it twice would move onto the next track. Simple yet functional.

Harlan bought me a new iPhone during the Thanksgiving break, and considering the problem with my iPod is the increase volume button is broken I thought I could use these headphones to work around the problem. I noticed Apple did some tweaking in the three years since I last used them. Before it had a minimal amount of features because there were just three buttons. Since then they've added fast forward/rewind, switching to the previous track, and ... I don't even fucking know what this is, but sometimes when I try to stop the music, instead this voice comes on that tells me the name of the track (and considering I listen to a lot of anime music she usually completely butchers the pronunciation) plus the names of all the playlists. What was working before is just a goddamned mess because half the time when I want to move to the next track I'm suddenly fast forwarding or having this motherfucking voice telling me what I'm listening to (as if I can't see the screen) and my playlists (as if I forgot what they were). I should probably go onto some website to tell me what the hell I'm doing — Is it the speed that I press twice? Is fast forwarding pressing higher up and not in the middle? — but I really shouldn't have to do that. Before I was able to intuitively figure out how this works, which is how good design should work. For a company that prides itself in such matters, they completely screwed this one up.