When disk drives eat cake

From my last post there was a comment at the bottom from Corwin that went like this:

“You really need to upgrade to two monitors - it’s saved my keyboards’ ALT and TAB keys.”

I’d never actually considered that before, I suppose it does stand to reason though that more something gets used the sooner it will break down. I mean, just look at any of the Reds pitchers…

That got me thinking about all the times I’ve had computer hardware go bad, for any reason, not just overuse. I had a video card once that decided putting horizontal lines across the screen every inch was a good idea. There was that notebook I had for work years ago that burned out an internal battery leaving the machine unbootable. I’ve had more modems than I can count just stop working for no good reason.

(Well, unless you consider the fact that modems just suck in general as a good reason.)

My favorite of one of all time though is a 3.5″ floppy drive that got killed in college by a snack cake.

Seriously. All right, I’ll explain, but first a bit of background.

When I was in college my senior year I lived in a house with a bunch of other guys. The majors broke down something like this:

Computer science (me)
Computer science/math (Chip)
Physics/computer science (Honk)
Psychology (Cap’n)
Latin and Greek (B)

Yep, that’s right, Latin and Greek. Don’t let that fool you though, today he is some kind of computer security administrator at, well, let’s not give away the name, a giant international paper company.

Cap’n could care less about computers but he was into video games so that made him all right in our book.

Anyhow, one afternoon, for reasons that escape me, we had several different computers in various stages of pieces all laid out on the living room floor. We also had a metric ton of junk food, including the bounty of our latest Coke raid at the grocery store:

Honk was washing down his Coke with a Ding Dong when one of us insulted him about something or another. In retaliation he threw the tin foil wrapper of the Ding Dong at the insulter. Now, being in physics he should have known that something with so little weight could never actually make it across the room to hit a target. Instead it slowly floated toward the floor until it landed directly on top of a 3.5″ floppy drive that had been taken out of a computer.

And then it sparked.

*Cross heart and holds up scouts’ honor fingers* I swear it did, I saw with my very own eyes.

What followed was a chorus of:

“Did you see that?”
“No way!”
“Does it still work?”
“You &#*$(#@!”

We put the computer back together and lo and behold the drive never worked again. In fact, you could say, “Ding Dong, the drive is dead.”

Thankyouverymuch. I’ll be here all week. Make sure to tip your waitress.