Headset with (Bad) Attitude

I recently picked up a new Xbox 360 headset. I had to do this because Microsoft makes a great deal of (to be technical) ‘crap that breaks.’ So far, the death total is: 1 Xbox 360 (Red Ring of Death), one controller, and 3 headsets. Oddly enough, this blog is not about the evils of Microsoft, but about the packaging for the headset in question.

As I was saying before my Microsoft rant, I bought a Plantronic headset for the Xbox. The set itself is decent (I should hope so-these guys designed the headsets for the moon landings) but the package text is not so decent. The text refers to the user’s friends as “know-it-all, bench-warming trash talkers you call ‘friends'” which seems needlessly hostile. It also gets right down to the avowed purpose of the headset-to “verbally devastate foes” using the mic boom that “flexes to fit your trash talking maw.”

I know that the hip, soul-patched marketing minions put together the text to appeal to the target audience. The text shows that they know this audience well. As I related in an earlier blog, trash-talking is the dominate thing in online gaming. I am somewhat surprised that the package did not say something like “Our headset is so cool that you can scream ‘fag’ out of your hateful maw and your gay foes will clearly and distinctly know that their sexual orientation has been soul-patched with your verbal devastation!”

Yes, I know it is just a headset. But, there really seems to be no need to give more encouragement to people to behave even worse than they already do.

Oh, as far as the headset itself goes, I like it. It does hold well to my ear without being irritating. It also has a volume control (I use that often) and a mic off/on switch. My only real gripe is that the mic boom rotates too easily and does not lock in place-mine gets turned around so that my verbal onslaughts sometimes get a bit muted. That was easily fixed by a bit of electrical tape, though. I got mine on sale for $20-about the same price as Microsoft’s crappy headset.