An e-mail from Di said she'd be out late, so I grabbed the now-charged earpiece and gave it another try. Luckily, one of my guild-mates was online, so i was able to have a good, independent test. Apparently, that was all the problem was, because things worked smooth for the next couple hours of play.
Looks like I'm back in bizness.
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In other news, the aforementioned terrible sleep really screwed up my day, yesterday. Firstly, my apologies to