Bonus episode #125 – The perfect crime
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Hello everyone and welcome to bonus episode number 125 of the Q-Lips English podcast. My name's Andrew. I will be your host and your English study buddy for today. I hope you're doing well. In this episode, I'm going to tell you about a kind of funny and sad story that ironically happened to me and happened to my wife at the same time. Actually, they're two totally different disconnected stories.

But in a weird way, they're actually connected. So I hope you'll enjoy this story and I'll get started with it in just a moment. But before I do, I want to introduce what our bonus episodes are all about. So as I said, my name's Andrew and I'm a Canadian English teacher who's currently based out of Seoul, South Korea. And in our bonus episode series, what I do is I tell you some stories from my life. And I hope that by listening to these stories, you will be able to big time.

Big B-I-G-B. That is our motto for this series, and it's an acronym. It stands for build your fluency, increase your cultural knowledge, grow your vocabulary, and ultimately become a clearer and better communicator.

So if you are interested in big being, then you're in the right place. And I'm going to try and help you achieve that goal with this series. And to accompany this episode, there's a 100% free interactive transcript and vocabulary glossary that you can get just by clicking the link in the description for this episode and

And if you're a Q-Lips member, well, then we're also going to give you a comprehension quiz so you can check how much you are able to understand from listening to this episode. Now, speaking of Q-Lips membership, guys, I want to give a shout out to all of our Q-Lips members out there. We love you guys. The Q-Lips member community is what supports the work that we do here at Q-Lips. It allows us to keep making English lessons each and every week.

And if you are a Q-Lips member, then we give you lots of benefits and bonuses and awesome study tools to help you improve your English fluency easier and faster than ever. So what will you get? Well, you'll get awesome, helpful study guides for all of our episodes, plus interactive transcripts,

It's a great tool that you can use just to click on any word that you hear and repeat the audio from that point. So it's great for shadowing, for listening and repeating, for doing repeated listening, all of these intense study techniques. The interactive transcript is great for that, but there's so much more. You'll get ad-free audio, so you don't have to listen to any ads or promotions like the one you're listening to right now.

And maybe best of all, there are speaking classes that we have each and every week. We run three of them per week. And as a member, you're welcome to join as many of them as you would like to practice your English speaking skills with other members of our Q-Lips member community.

plus one of our great teachers as well. So the idea is that you listen to our podcast for the week, and then in the speaking classes, we're going to discuss that episode. And all skill levels are welcome to join. It's really a great time. I love when I host the speaking classes. I get to connect with

with our listeners out there and it's just awesome we have people from all over the world at all different levels of english fluency and it's just really cool to communicate and connect with them so i think you would enjoy it as well

If you would like to sign up and become a Q-Lips member and see all of the benefits that you get, because to be honest, there are many more than what I just highlighted, then just visit our website, qlips.com, or click the link in the description for this episode, and you can sign up and become a member today. Okay, so I think those are all the announcements that I wanted to make here at the start of the show.

Yeah, I also would invite you to come and check out our Discord server too, now that I think of it. If you haven't joined our Discord server yet, it's a great place to connect with other English learners just like you. And we'll be talking about this episode over on our Discord server. So after you listen, come on over. It's 100% free to join for everyone. And we'll continue the conversation and I'll

answer your questions, or if you have a comment to share, then please let me know over on the Discord server. Just click the link in the description to join. We'll put that link there. Okay, truly, truly, those are all the announcements that I wanted to tell you about now. So without any further ado, let's get started with this week's story. Here we go. Enjoy.

If you listened to last week's bonus episode, you'll know that I teased talking about my knee injury in this week's episode. I was going to tell you guys about some of the things that I realized and learned about myself and about society from having to wear a knee brace around town for the last few days while I recovered from my knee injury that happened to me while I was running a marathon a couple of weeks ago.

But I'm a little bit tired of talking about my knee. It's something that everybody asks you about when you're wearing a knee brace around town for several days. And I've also talked about it a lot here on Q-Lips. So I'm not going to talk about my knee in this episode. By the way, I'm feeling 100% better. I think I'm back to my old self. So yeah, I'm going to talk about my knee.

in the end, wasn't a big injury. And I still do want to talk to you guys about those things that I realized and learned about myself and society while I had to wear that knee brace. But I'm going to save that story for a Fluency Files episode. That's our member-only series.

And by the way, I uploaded a Fluency Files episode last week to our website. So if you are a Q-Lips member, check out that brand new Fluency Files episode. I believe it's episode number 70 already. We've hit 70 episodes in Fluency Files. So that's pretty cool.

But for this week's story, I have something totally different to talk to you about. And let me get to that story now. It's about something that my wife and I went through separately, but weirdly together at the same time. We had two separate but similar experiences over the last couple of weeks. I think this happened about two weeks ago.

So I'll start with me, my end of the story, and then I'll share what happened to my wife. And then you can compare and see how these stories really share a lot in common. So...

I hate to go back to running. I've been talking a lot about running recently, but I think regular Q-Lips listeners will know that that's my hobby. That's my main exercise. I really love running. And when I go out running, when I'm like training for a marathon or something, I do it quite a bit. I try to get out there at least four or five, six times a week. I'm not one of those really hardcore runners that goes seven days a week without rest and

Although I respect those people who can do that, but that's not me. I definitely need a rest day, but I like to get outside and run often. And while I run, I have a variety of different things that I like to do to kind of kill the time. Because to be honest with you, running is a little bit boring, especially when you're going out on a long run and you're maybe running for two hours or

it can get a little bit boring to tell you the truth. So there are some different forms of entertainment that I like to try and keep myself occupied with.

I listen to audiobooks sometimes, and in a recent Simplified Speech episode, I talked with my co-host Cassie about that, and I'll leave the link for that episode in the description for this episode if you want to listen to it. So sometimes I listen to audiobooks. Sometimes I listen to music. I'm a huge music fan. I love music.

And music has a really unique power in that it can motivate us and pump us up and get us going faster. At least for me, if the right song comes on at the right moment when I'm running, then it can really inspire me to push harder and go faster. And yeah, music is great to listen to while I run.

Sometimes I just am alone with my thoughts. And then sometimes if it's like a really hard workout, then I actually talk to myself. And sometimes I'll create a mantra and I'll repeat that mantra just to take my mind off of the hard work that my body is doing and to try and

distract myself so that I don't quit midway through the run. So those are some of the different things that I do while I'm running. And when it comes to audiobooks or podcasts, I like listening to podcasts too. Obviously, I'm a huge podcast fan as a podcaster. Or listening to music, then I listen to those with headphones. And my wife about podcasts,

maybe three or four years ago, I think before we got married. So this must have been at least four years ago. She bought me a pair of Apple AirPod Pros when they were first released, the very first edition of the AirPod Pros. She gave them to me as a Christmas gift one year, and it totally surprised me. And I

I loved that because, yeah, it's just a really fantastic product. They work really well. They sound great. They connect easily with my watch so that when I'm running, I don't have to take my phone with me or any other devices. I can just connect my AirPods with my watch and I'm out there and I'm running. I'm listening to my music or audio books or podcasts. And it's fantastic. It's a great system.

Well, what happened a couple of weeks ago, I guess this was maybe several weeks ago now, because it was while I was training for that marathon where I ended up hurting my knee. Okay, so let's say it's about a month ago, I was out for a run, and I was listening to music. And I came home.

And usually guys, what I do as soon as I come in the door, we have a window right beside our front door. And so when I come in the door, I take out my AirPods and I place them right on that windowsill. And then, you know, I shower up, I get changed. And then I will take my AirPods and put them back in their charging case so that,

I can charge them up. And that's my routine. I do that every single time so that I won't lose my AirPods because I know if I lose them and they're so small, right? They're just those little tiny earbuds that don't have any wires and that fit in your ears.

I misplace them or put them in a spot where I can't remember where I put them, then that's it. They're going to be lost forever. And I'm one of those forgetful people that I could really easily see myself losing them. And I know so many of my friends and colleagues have lost AirPods. So yeah, you got to be careful with that, right? So I have this routine to help me not do that. So

It's been working great for all of these years. When I lived in my previous apartment, I had a similar system. And now in this new house, I have a similar system. Come in the door, take out my AirPods, put them on the windowsill. I know where they are and it's going to be okay.

However, when I was coming back from this particular run, as I got into our front yard and was going to open the front door, my wife called out to me. And in that moment, I can't remember what she wanted, but I think she wanted me to like do something in the yard, maybe take the garbage out or pick something up that was in the front yard. And

And so in that moment, I took out my AirPod so that I could speak with my wife and I put them in my pocket, in my shorts pocket. And then I went and did the task that my wife asked me to do or whatever happened. I can't exactly remember, but my routine worked.

Got spoiled, right? My routine was ruined. I didn't repeat that automatic step of taking my AirPods out, putting them on the windowsill, taking my shower and then recharging my AirPods. That routine was ruined. So I wasn't able to do that.

So what ended up happening then was that I skipped that step, right? I went and did the task that I had to do. I got back, I showered up. And then immediately, this is like the next step after I shower is that I wash my running clothes so that they're not stinky and lying around in the house. Nobody wants that, right? So immediately, I washed my running clothes. So

But what was in the pocket that I totally forgot about? Yes, that is right. It was my AirPod Pros. So terrible, right? Now, thankfully, the weather was really good still at this time. And that particular day, the weather was nice outside. So after I did the laundry, I hung my clothes outside in the yard to dry. And while I was doing that,

I felt my AirPods in my pocket and I realized, oh my gosh, I just washed my AirPods. No! And so I know in this kind of situation, when you get some electronics wet, you don't want to use them right away. You want to try and let the electronics to fully dry out before you use them or else maybe it can cause some electronic damage.

shortage or something like that. I'm not an electrician. I don't know the exact term to use, but I know don't operate electronics while they're wet, right? So I went onto Google and I searched what should I do in this kind of situation. And I read that you're actually supposed to use a silica gel. And a silica gel is, you know, those little packs. Sometimes you'll see

Sometimes they come with new clothing or when you buy something new and you open the box, there will be a silica gel package to keep things

the humidity from building up within the package. And I actually didn't have one handy, but I take a multivitamin daily and my multivitamin was almost finished. I had like two multivitamins left in the bottle and I knew that there was a silica gel in that multivitamin bottle because every time I try to get one of the vitamins out of the bottle, that silica gel pops out. It's kind of annoying.

But it came in very handy for this situation because I had that gel. So what I actually did was I put the wet AirPods in the multivitamin bottle with the silica gel and I left it for a couple of days just sitting there to dry off. Of course, I emptied the bottle of the vitamins before I did that, but it did the trick. So after a couple of days, I put the AirPods back in.

Actually, I went onto YouTube because I found this is another thing that was new to me that I learned is that if you get water into your phone or into your AirPods or probably any kind of headphones, there's actually a sound file that you can play that will emit a certain frequency that is designed to vibrate any water or

droplets that remain within your electronic device and hopefully expel them, push them out of the speaker. So if you get water like in your phone through the speaker, the water can be

pushed out and expelled. And same goes for the AirPods. So I found this audio file, and I cranked the volume up to 10. And I played it a couple times, hoping that if there was still some water in the device, then it would be expelled and come out. And so I did that a few times. And after letting them dry for a few days, I tried them out. And thankfully, they

they worked okay i was like yes okay i almost ruined this wonderful beautiful gift that my wife had bought me way back when when we were dating but i saved the day it's not a big deal they still work fine okay so that was the first time i messed up but as you can maybe tell with the word choice that i just used messed up

it happened again. So a very similar kind of situation. I went out for a run. I came back home. Something in my routine got messed up. And again, I forgot to put my AirPods on the windowsill after coming in the front door. And instead, I left them in my pocket and I washed them again. However, this time I wasn't as lucky as the first time.

because that day it wasn't nice outside. So after washing my clothes, I had to put them in the dryer. So this time the AirPods went through the wash for the second time. Then they went through a drying cycle in the dryer and

And then when I found them, I wasn't as optimistic, but I repeated the same steps. So I let them dry with a silica gel for a few days. And then I played that audio file that sends the high frequency that ejects the water from the device. And I tried them again and they worked. Amazing. I couldn't believe it. They worked.

or at least I thought they worked. You see, after a couple of days of using them, then on the right-hand side, left-hand side was fine, but the right-hand side, I started to get some static and it wasn't clear playback that I was getting. There was some static in the audio and some fuzz. Then after a few more days, the sound on the right-hand side completely died out and it hasn't returned and it's been several weeks since then.

So I killed my AirPods. I killed the right hand side of my AirPods. I mean, it's not great. Listening to music is really impossible because you need both your ears to listen to music. I'm still using it sometimes to listen to audio books and podcasts. I find that I can listen with just one ear to those and it's not

as bad but it's not a great listening experience the whole point of having airpods or at least one of the big selling features to me is that they're noise cancelling so that if i'm riding the bus or if i'm in a busy loud crowded public place then i can just turn the noise cancelling on and i can find

some peace and quiet by blocking out the noise around me. But if you only have one ear in, then your other ears completely open and you're not going to get that noise canceling effect. Right? So yeah, that is the first story I wanted to tell you guys is that I ruined my AirPods and I don't, I don't know if I've told my wife yet that the left-hand side isn't working. So maybe if my wife is listening to this episode, she'll find out, but yeah,

Or sorry, the right-hand side. I should say the right-hand side isn't working. So maybe she'll find out. And yeah, unfortunate. I don't know what to do. Should I buy a new pair of AirPods? I think you can buy one replacement one.

I don't know, should I wait and see? Hopefully, maybe they'll come back to life, but I don't think so. So I'm kind of, you know, they're so expensive to buy. I don't know exactly what to do, but maybe I will buy a new pair of AirPods because they are just a really great product. I really enjoyed using them for the several years that I had them before. I unfortunately killed it.

So that's the first story that I wanted to tell you, okay? It's about me killing my AirPods. And now the second story that happened to my wife recently is also about an unfortunate event with an Apple product, but whereas the AirPods were totally on me, that was on me for killing them. That's 100% my fault. I was the one that messed up and ruined them.

Here, this story, I think, is not so much on my wife. It's on somebody else. Although maybe in retrospect, my wife probably thinks there's something that she could have done to avoid this whole situation in the first place. I'm sure she feels like, oh, I shouldn't have done that.

But it's not on her. So there's a difference in the stories in this regard. But anyways, let's start at the beginning of this story. And I have to go back to before we were married again, because weirdly enough, that same Christmas where my wife gave me the AirPods, I think, yeah, we were dating at this time, probably like a year or so before we got married. And I have to go back to before we were married again, because weirdly enough, that same Christmas where my wife gave me the AirPods, I think, yeah, we were dating at this time, probably like a year or so before we got married again.

She gave me the AirPods for Christmas and I gave her an Apple Watch for Christmas at that same time. So it was kind of weird that we bought each other these Apple accessories at the same time, but that's what happened. And she had been wearing the Apple Watch ever since I gave it to her. And yeah, she told me that she really likes wearing the Apple Watch and that's

Especially for swimming, which is my wife's hobby. She really liked how she could do the activity tracking with her watch. And actually, guys, it's really incredible. I don't know if you've ever used an Apple Watch to go swimming, but it gives you a lot of great data about your swimming when you wear it.

and swim. It will tell you how long of a pool you're swimming in. So it will say your pool laps are 25 meters. I think in my wife's case, her pool that she goes to is 25 meters long. It tells you about how fast you swim, how many meters you swam, all of these great statistics that you can get from tracking your swimming with the Apple Watch. So my wife really enjoyed it for that reason. And so she would

go swimming, get the data, put it on her Strava. I use this app Strava for tracking my runs. And yeah, it's kind of fun. We would encourage each other on our exercise this way by tracking our runs and swims respectively, and then uploading it to Strava. So that means that my wife wears her Apple watch to the swimming pool.

And a couple of weeks ago, she went to a new swimming pool that I think she had never been to before, or she had only been to one time before. The swimming pool that she goes to regularly that day was closed for maintenance. So she had to go to a different pool to swim that day. And it wasn't her regular home ground. And I think why this is maybe an important point to emphasize and highlight is because

She goes to her regular swimming pool maybe two or three, four times a week. Yeah, sometimes up to four times a week. And she's pretty friendly with the staff there. A lot of the other people who swim there at the same time as her, they're regulars. So she has friends there and acquaintances there. And she's pretty comfortable with...

everybody who's around there. You know, there's not too many people that are strangers to her when she goes there. She's familiar there. However, with this new pool, she doesn't know the staff. She doesn't know any of the other swimmers and it's, she's the one that's new, right? At the new pool. So she went swimming and after swimming, she was in the locker room to change and shower and get ready. All of these things that you do after swimming. And she,

After she changed, she said that she was doing her hair. So there's like a section, I guess. I'm not too familiar with the inside of the locker room, but there's a section, she said, where there's like a big mirror and some hair dryers and you can blow dry your hair and brush your hair and do all of these things that I wish I could do, but I unfortunately can't.

If you guys have seen my photo, then you know why I unfortunately can't blow dry or brush my hair. But she was doing these things and...

She said that when she was doing these things, she didn't have her Apple Watch on. She said that she had changed at her locker and gone to this hair station area and put some of the things down on the hair station and then went back to her locker and came back to the hair station. And she sort of went back and forth a few times as she was getting ready after swimming. And after she had finished doing her hair and was ready to leave, she said,

she noticed that she couldn't find her watch. So she spent like the next hour, she said, and I can totally believe this because I've seen my wife lose things before. And she is very, very strict about searching absolutely everywhere until the item is found.

And so I can imagine that she was searching everywhere and she talked to the staff. She talked to one of the ladies who was cleaning the changing room and she couldn't find it absolutely anywhere. And she even tried looking on her phone to see if she could connect her phone to her watch. And she noticed in that moment that there was no connection there.

between her phone and her watch anymore. And so what does that mean? It means that the watch is not in the vicinity anymore. So how did it get out of the vicinity? Well, that means somebody must have stolen her watch.

So in that moment when she was going back between the mirror and the hairdryer area and her locker, I guess she had her back turned and wasn't really looking at her things. And somebody noticed maybe it was a crime of opportunity. We call this kind of situation a crime of opportunity, where maybe you're not planning to steal an Apple Watch when you wake up that day, but the opportunity arises and you take advantage of that opportunity again.

And so, yeah, my wife's Apple Watch got stolen in the locker room at the swimming pool. We never found who did it. And my wife was very angry. But also, like I said, it wasn't her fault, right? You're the victim of a crime. Obviously, it's the criminal, the person who did the crime.

I'd imagine it's a woman because it was in the woman's locker room, right? So this woman who stole the watch, she's the baddie. She's the one who did the bad deed. But at the same time, my wife was like, oh, why didn't I just keep my eyes on my watch? Why wasn't I wearing it? Of course you blame yourself for this situation.

But when I think about it, you know, Korea has very low crime like this. We call this petty crime where you're not really stealing something very expensive. It's just stealing something small. Okay, under maybe $500, we would consider petty crime.

And so Korea has very, very low rates of petty crime. But I think one of the reasons why the petty crime rate is really, really low is that there are security cameras everywhere, CCTV cameras everywhere. And so it's pretty much guaranteed that if you're in a public place, you're going to be filmed, could be on the street, in a cafe, there's going to be cameras around everywhere.

So it's a very risky activity to try and steal something because there are so many cameras around. But in a woman's locker room, there's going to be no cameras, right? Like it would be really creepy and illegal to put some cameras in a woman's locker room. So

It's kind of the perfect environment, the perfect place for this kind of petty crime of convenience. So unfortunately, my wife was victim to that. And so now we are out some of these accessories that we bought each other for Christmas a few years ago. I ruined my AirPod and my wife lost her Apple Watch because somebody stole it.

So that was kind of a bummer. I mean, kind of a funny story in retrospect, how these two things ironically happened right at the very same time. But for us, not so funny, because now I can't listen to music properly, and my wife can't track her swims properly. And so I said...

I'm going to buy my wife a new Apple Watch. That's my goal. So I'm saving up my money and I'm going to buy her a new one because I feel bad about that. So I'll replace her Apple Watch. And yeah, maybe after listening to this episode and she finds out that my AirPod is broken, the right hand side, maybe, just maybe she'll buy me an AirPod. But I have a feeling she won't be as understanding since it was my fault.

Anyways, guys, I think this is a good place to wrap up this episode. Up ahead this week, everyone, have a great week of English learning. Please take care and I'll be back soon with the next brand new Q-Lips episode. Talk to you then. Goodbye.