I recently purchased a pair of headphones manufactured by Maxell. They say on the outside of the packaging ‘LIFETIME WARANTY’. They look like this, only white and black:

This is pretty impressive for fairly cheap headphones, but I was curious as to whose lifetime they were referring to (and how they know I won’t pass it on as a yerusha to my children.

Luckily all my questions were answered as soon as I opened up the packaging and read the terms of the warranty:

Maxell warrants this product to be free from all defects for a period of 90 dys from the date of original purchase. This Warranty does not apply to normal wear or damage due to accident, abnormal use, misuse or neglect…

So in fact it must be referring to the lifetime of a geriatric moth. AND this warranty covers neither normal wear and tear, nor abnormal use. Huh??? So what exactly would be covered??

Luckily they were cheap, and I didn’t expect them to last a lifetime anyway, but it started me thinking about how things appear from the outside and how the truth on the inside is very different. We also imagine ourselves to be immortal, we think that we have a lifetime guarantee. Yet our days are finite, and we should make the most of them now while we can!

This is actually always the ploy of the yetzer hara (anyone have a good translation of that? evil urge? evil desire? evil inclination?). Enjoy yourself now, it says in our heads, because there is always tomorrow. Why put off until tomorrow what you can put off until the day after tomorrow?

But then it catches up with us, and we run out of time. In the words of Pink Floyd, “We run and we run to catch up with the sun, but its fleeting” Once the 90 days is up, who knows what will happen. The lifetime warranty runs out only too fast.

You see, we can even learn a lesson from little headphones. Now if I could only get the online shiur to download I’d be able to learn a lesson with the headphones as well.

Carry on.