My Headjack Sucks. This Is Why.

It's all about pus and sparks, savvy?

I have too much electricity running to my headjack. It can be a common problem with unlocked jacks, since they're not tuned to a specific carrier, like most commercial headjacks. I knew this when I picked it out and found one available for little more than a song.

The problem is actually caused by the carrier rig, not the jack, but that's just semantics. The rig sends an unimpeded signal directly from the nearest host switch, as I understand it, because if it was filtered it at all it would be considered wiretapping.

Normally this would be compensated by resistors in a commercial jack, or in the case of an unlocked jack - a bank of tunable resistors. Obviously I did my homework, right?

Enter my lifestyle: I am an unwealthy researcher, and I get most of my kit used. This was something I purchased new, and I wanted to find someone top-notch to install it. I tried everywhere, but no one would finance me. I put my ears to the ground and started networking all my friends, until I found a friend that knew a guy that knew a guy. i told him to set it up.

I may as well have asked Stephen Hawking's wheelchair to perform the operation.

The back-alley doctor that I found to implant a jack in my neck was an alcoholic, or really needed a cigarette, or maybe was just bored to fuck with surgeoning on some old meatjob every day and wanted to get his kicks off; whatever his affliction, the end result is my headjack emits sparks when I'm plugged-in, and the surrounding skin has taken to defend itself by giving me an inch-thick calloused ring-shaped donut under my left ear, with hot pink pustules sprinkled around the topmost ridge.

Really.

It's not an exercise in ergonomics, like the current rage from Samsung. It's functional, even though it is perpetually infected. It's not pretty. It is, however, pretty disgusting. I get asked about it constantly whenever I go out.

The cashier guy at Seven Eleven the other day wouldn't stop staring from the moment I walked in. Finally I asked, "Can I help you?"

"Does that, like, hurt?"

"Every Day. Can I have my cigarettes and change now you insensitive prick?"

I've taken to wearing a scarf from September to March. During the summer, though, it's impossible to hide. And I don't think I'm about to buy a stack of turtlenecks and cut the sleeves out.

So I get by. I work on the cloud, so I only go out for necessities, friends or family - and 99% of the latter two can be found online frollicking with their own avatars, visiting the popular channels like they were tourist attractions, and treating their sim selves as not much more than empty bedsheets.

I've had this jack for about four years now. I've since gathered enough scratch to see a real surgeon, who says it'll never come out unless i enjoy risking permanent spinal cord damage. Says if it works I should count my lucky stars and just keep using it like there's nothing wrong with it.

Except I have to sleeve the end of the input cable with neoprene - kind of like a suction cup catheter - so my rig doesn't explode. And it's hot to boot. Sweltering, in fact, hence the pustules.

So, yeah. It's all about the pus and sparks, savvy? Some kid hovering around the Youtube channel told me to keep saying it like a marketing slogan. Said I'd get more work because I'd have a rep, or some such a thing. I dunno, by the looks of his avatar he couldn't have been more than twelve, so I take that with a pretty hearty grain of salt. I have a reputation, a fairly decent one if Alexa has anything to say about it. I don't need another one that says I'm a freak of human nature.

Braxton Pipp

This work by Michael W. Hyde is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.