A:\ Drive of Holding

[chaobell]

Ah, foreign objects in floppy drives. Gotta love it.

Tried to insert Troubleshooter floppy. Stuck. Pulled floppy out. A playing card came out with it. Sighed. Removed playing card. Tried to insert floppy again. Still stuck. Pulled out. Peered into drive with flashlight. Found second playing card. Sighed. Removed playing card. Tried to insert floppy yet again. Still stuck. Sighed. Removed floppy drive. Heard ominous rattle. Upended floppy drive with door held open. Some pocket change falls out. Deep sigh. Try to insert floppy again. Guess what! Still stuck! Directed several four-letter words at floppy drive, at rest of shitty computer, and at small child that undoubtedly stuck all this crap in there. Dissected floppy drive. Removed several more pennies and the metal thing from a floppy disk from drive. Reassembled drive. Floppy goes in and out as advertised. Hooked drive up. Lo and behold, drive worked.

Not as good as the Tweety Bird keychain I found that one time, but still amusing for a while.

Comments

[agentz.livejournal.com]

Yeah the old foreign-object-in-floppy-drive routine!

I do support for schools with kids ranging from 5 to 18 and its amazing what we can fish out of disk and CD drives.

The most common at the moment is from secondary schools and usually Apple G3 iMac with slot loading CD rom drives. I reckon we get a couple of machines most weeks reported as "CD rom not working - spits disks out straight away". It usually turns out to be a page of someones homework ripped out of their workbook, folded up and shoved into the slot.

Occasionally fish out random plastic items from infant school floppy drives including plastic animals, lego minifigs, hair grips and even the odd magnetic letter or two.

Best one I ever dealt with was a call to an inkjet printer not feeding paper from the vertical paper tray (think it was an Epson or something similar). I looked and sure enough the paper wasn't being gripped by the pickup roller. Had a look and couldn't see anything obvious so removed the ink tanks, turned the printer upside down and shook.

And out fell about a dozen grains of rice, some short bits of spaghetti, a drawing pin and a paper clip. How weird.

I look about the classroom and spot across the other side of the room a great big collage made out of tissue paper, rice and spaghetti pinned to the wall. Eventually the class teacher admitted that the computer 'used to be over there but things keep falling off the collage'. Like thanks, couldn't you have thought about that before sticking it up behind your computer?

[chaobell]

I think the best one we ever had, though it wasn't actually foreign objects in a drive, was the one where the customer's kid kept shoving CD's through this little gap between the CD-ROM drive and the little placeholder plate. We pulled, I shit you not, no fewer than fifteen CD's out of the case. Customer arrived to pick the box up.

"OH! I was wondering where those went!"

There was also the CD in the 5 1/4" floppy drive, which ruined both the CD and the drive...fortunately we've never seen pb&j sandwiches in Travan drives or anything, so I count myself lucky.

Moral: Keep your children away from the computer if they are holding anything smaller than their heads. It will end up in the computer.