I know a genuine hands-free device should be something like this.
The first time I saw a real hands-free device in use was from Robbie, my ex-colleague, who is an enthusiast of high technology product. One day in 2005 when we were in a cruise of visiting students, I saw there was a light blue object attaching to his right ear. I asked him what that was for? And he said it was called Bluetooth hands-free phone. He demonstrated for me how that device worked. The device sent the music from the stereo audio of the car into his earpiece with the wireless technology. And when the device detected an incoming call, it switched from music to the call automatically. And when the conversation finished, it came back to music at Robbie's will.
The memory of the encounter with a real hands-free device that time inspired me of making my version of hands-free device when my PD began to affect me with a phone conversation about a half year ago. What happened was when I was engaged in a chat over the phone for longer than 10 minutes or if the content of the conversation was serious, then my hand that held the handset tended to shake and thus the tip of the handset would be taping on my cheek or the temporal area around my ear repeatedly like a woodpecker does to a tree, and that is very annoying and uncomfortable, but it is also uncontrollable.
So I thought to myself if I could convert one of those discarded old telephone sets out in the corner of our garage into one that has two sockets -- one for my earphone plug and the other for my microphone plug. Then when I am engaged in a conversation over the phone, the "woodpecker symptom" will not trouble me again.
When this idea was matured in late May, I started gathering up materials and tools. I had a headset that was no longer in use, so this saved me a lot of time and energy in making one from scratches. I have soldering set and the tin core; I have a voltmeter for checking if the connection is good; I have a set of electronic tools and power drill, and I am pretty sure this project should be a piece of cake and could be expected to be finished the next day.
Then I found I needed to go to Jaycar to buy two mono audio sockets of 3.5 mm. So I made a journey to Jaycar by walk and that was a great struggle. And then I found I had to extend the two pairs of cables to the two desired areas in the phone set where there were enough rooms to accommodate the two audio sockets.
The cables were so fine that peeling their skins on the two ends for soldering was very challenging. I finally found a way to get this job done -- burned the tip of the cable using a candlelight and nipped the softened skin of the cable immediately when it was moved away from the flame.
Then I found I had to do the soldering within a very small space without making the soldering stick contact with the neighboring cable or circuit and get them damaged. That was the most challenging part of this project.
On and on, I could see some progress every day, and I realized that it was not a case as simple as a piece of cake to me and I accepted the reality. A couple of times, I thought I had done all the soldering and assembled the whole thing up, only to discover that it could not work. apparently I had damaged the soldered points, or I had connected the extended cable to the wrong point of the socket. So the process of unpacking, disconnecting, line checking, were all done over again with fingers crossed hoping this time would be a successful one. Unfortunately it was not until the fourth repeat that I could finally see it functioning as was expected.
Seeing me absorbed in the project so deeply my wife suggested many times that she would be happy to buy me a genuine hands-free phone. She could not understand what the self-satisfaction, self-fulfillment and the lot of fun that I had had throughout the process of converting a discarded old telephone set into a model that enables me to be free from the woodpecker symptom in a telephone conversation.:-)
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