Yesterday morning I stuck a Death Cab for Cutie CD in my work computer's CD drive and listened to it for most of the day. Apparently the computer liked it too, because when I tried to eject it and take it home, it would most emphatically not eject. After some heated combat I retreated to regroup overnight.
When I came back this morning, the same thing was still happening. I tried everything: pressing the button on the CD drive, pressing the eject
control on the Windows CD-player program, selecting Eject
from the context menu in Windows Explorer, sticking an unbent paperclip in the hole. Nothing. The light would blink, like the drive was thinking very hard about it, but nothing would happen (and often the CD would start autoplaying again).
So I asked Renita, who told me to ask Susan, who told me to ask Eric. Eric tried all the things I had already tried and then implied (with a joking sort of irony) that we had broken it, while he took the case off the computer and removed the CD drive. He grinched and grumbled vocally but obviously enjoyed getting his hands on the innards of hardware. He had to disassemble the drive almost completely in order to get the CD out, and even then the tray still wouldn't open. There had been talk of surplussing the drive, but that option was ruled out; as Eric said, I don't think anybody's going to want to disassemble the drive every time they want to put a new CD in.
A nice side effect is that Susan took a good look at my computer, said I thought we replaced this!
and set about getting it replaced with a newer one. In the meantime, I have a replacement drive... but I'm not going to put anything important in it, just in case.
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