It turns out my iPod wasn't defunct after all. It just needed turning back on!

Apparently, for the last three and a half years, every single time I thought I was turning it off or on, I was in fact putting it in and out of a state more akin to a laptop's ‘suspend’ function. On Monday it took it into its head, for reasons unexplained, to power itself off properly, which meant that pressing what I thought was the On button but was actually the Unsuspend button did nothing. To actually turn it on, one has to apply a Vulcan nerve pinch to two particular buttons and hold it for eight seconds, whereupon it spends a minute or so booting up before being willing to do anything.

I thought Apple were supposed to be masters of creating computing devices that a non-expert could use. If you can't even find the on switch without looking on the Internet, something is wrong!

(Unless, I suppose, any non-expert would have known to do that immediately, and I only failed to because my mind was too highly trained?)