Mess of the Week: The Invisible Mayhem Edition

About five weeks ago my external CD/DVD drive randomly stopped working.  I discovered in the morning one day when I was in a tremendous rush to burn a CD to use at a music class that I teach.  The drive wouldn’t read the CD no matter what I tried.  It would think and spit it right back out at me.  I probably tried 100 times with various CDs.  I did research on the internet.  Finally I gave up and decided it really, truly must be broken, and I made plans to go to the store to get a new one.

However, around here, my plans to go to store take weeks to actually materialize.  I made do with my iPod for music class and a few other CDs, which worked but wasn’t as easy and cohesive.  Every week I’d make a plan to get to the store on a certain day, but one thing or another would come up and I’d never get there.

The first week of May I had FIRM plans to get to the store on Friday, because I was really going to need that CD drive for a number of professional things that were coming up that I needed to be prepared for.  Lo and behold on Thursday morning I was in my office working and I looked over at that CD drive and saw something pink sticking out maybe half a millimeter from the slot.  It scooted in when I examined it closer, but I discovered that it was a gift card.

Yes, someone had inserted a gift card into the external drive, and it had disappeared.

After a lot of finagling with various different tools, I managed to extract that flat little thing, and when I saw it was a used iTunes gift card, I remembered it residing for a bit on the top of my desk.  Apparently some curious fingers got ahold of it.  I don’t know which curious fingers, but let me tell you that I’m grateful that I saw the corner of the gift card before I went to the store and got a new piece of hardware.

The external drive works perfectly again.

Children.