...and it stopped, short, never to go again when the old man died.

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Clocks stop when people die. It happened to Richard Feynman's wife. However, he wasn't the sort to believe that the two events were connected in any supernatural way. A quick Google on the subject will lead you to numerous accounts of his earthly explanation for what actually happened.

My problem is less about clocks stopping, and more to do with earphones becoming muffled.

I listen to a lot of music. Every day, I spend about 45 minutes each way on the walk to/from work listening to music from my phone.

I have a problem finding earphones which don't fall out of my ears as I'm walking - I probably have especially slippery ears, or weirdly shaped ears - who knows. In any case, I've found several sets now which don't fall out.

However, within a couple of months, every set I have suffers the same problem. It's happened to earphones from Bose, Sennheiser and even the cheap £4.99 ones from Dixons.

After a couple of months, the left earpiece becomes muffled. The right one is fine, but the left one has almost all of the treble missing. I've tried putting the left ear-piece into my right ear just to check that it's not my left ear at fault, and it still sounds muffled compared with the right-hand earpiece.

So there is obviously something about my left ear which causes this to happen to earphones from different manufacturers and of different designs.

I know the explanation isn't supernatural; but I'm out of ideas on this one. Any suggestions?

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