I’ve been using a Sansa Clip MP3 player while doing yard work for years now – they’re inexpensive, tiny, durable, and you can install Rockbox on them, which has the most bulletproof audiobook playback of any device I’ve used (as an aside, seriously, why is this so hard to do well? I have one thing an audiobook player must always do: remember where I was last time I listened to the book, without fail. Rockbox never fails, all others sometimes do). Anyway I had it in my pants pocket Saturday while mowing up the seasons’s leaves. I had snaked the headphone cable under my coat, something I’ve taken to doing to keep it getting hooked on something while mowing. Only a little loop sticks out between my coat and pants pocket. Somehow an apple tree branch snagged it, which I discovered when the book suddenly stopped and I noticed the end of the headphone cord dangling down the side of the mower. Bummer! It had apparently been flung into the leaves I had been mulching, and I spent the next half hour or so with a rake trying to tease it out of the piles. Many curses later, I had not found it. I gave up, finished mulching, then went inside for lunch. I ordered a replacement Sansa Clip from Amazon while I ate, this time a garish colored one the better to notice it next time. I came back out later with my phone for audio to mulch a different section of the yard. When it got dark I headed inside and tossed the fleece coat I had been wearing down the basement steps into the laundry pile. It hit the basement wall with crash, and bits of my Sansa clip scattered onto the floor, to my great surprise. Somehow that apple branch flung it from my jeans pocket into my fleece coat pocket, which in itself seems impossible, and then I took that coat off and put it on again at least twice without noticing that the player was in its pocket. Granted it’s the size of a matchbox, roughly, but are you kidding me? Worse, I tried to cancel the order with Amazon but missed the window, so now I have two Sansa Clips, one with a busted clip.