I love my two cats, but the little Siamese-tabby mix Jack is pretty aggressive and he’s been chasing my other cat Xev around a lot, particularly in the last, oh, month or so.

Yeah, you’d never guess that from the picture, right?

Okay, so a couple of weeks back, it’s business as usual - Xev is yowling because Jack is riding her back around the house.  (Yes, he’s fixed. They both are.  He’s just being an asshole.)  They make a mad dash out from behind the couch and…

SLAM!

I turn to see that one of the stands with one of my Bose Acoustimass 16 cubes has been knocked over and the two cubes that make up the speaker have come apart from each other at the part where they swivel.

Looking at the mechanism that was exposed, it looks like the thing literally just snaps together.  Unfortunately, the way it snaps together is so tight and fits together in just such a way that there’s really no way you can just snap it back together.  I can see that the assembly of the two cubes actually happens pretty early in the manufacturing process because it looks like the two cubes would need to be snapped together before the speaker bits got inserted.  The speakers proper still work, the cubes just aren’t attached anymore.

I tried everything short of actually disassembling the damn thing, but it was no use.  I ended up taking it to a repair shop who specializes in this sort of thing and it turns out the speakers aren’t field serviceable.  Of course they’re not.  Instead, they have to order me a replacement, and that’s going to cost me - wait for it - $151. That’s one-hundred-and-fifty-one American dollars.  That’s in addition to the $25 I already paid them to look at the thing for me (some of that is credited toward the total cost of the speaker, bringing it down to $151).

Travis == Over A Barrel.  ARGH.