This week, we had yet another "scheduled" power outage, which was supposed to last for four hours. (The power company doesn't actually *tell* us about this schedule, which really infuriates me.) Although it turned out that the outage was much shorter, while the power went out, let's just say I was not in the best frame of mind.
I have an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) with a battery back up, so I have a few minutes to shut down. When the power went out, I immediately started turning computer equipment off. Then I realized I still could use my laptop. The network hub had no power, so I thought, hey I'll just burn a CD off my main computer with the files I need and then I can return to what I was doing in laptop-land.
I grabbed a CD and slapped it into the writer. I started burning as the UPS was busy beeping and screaming at me. The progress bar got to 99% and then with a final squawk, everything went dark.
I uttered a few choice words and realized that my CD, which might be readable, is in fact still sealed in the drive. At that point, I'm uttering more choice words when the phone rings. It's someone from Microsoft who wants to tell me about NetMeeting.
While I'm sort of not listening about the joys of NetMeeting, I'm thinking that I've read a tip somewhere that explains how to get a CD out of a drive when there's no power.
Somewhere in the middle of the Microsoftie's spiel, I told him I had no interest in NetMeeting, but I had a CD problem. That confused him. But he rose to the occasion and said he'd go ask "the tech guy" if there's a way to get the CD out. Meanwhile, I'm poking at my CD drive with a paperclip.
He comes back and says, "no, it's impossible and you really don't want Net Meeting do you?" We hung up and I went off to fire up the wood stove. I stared at the fire for a while and pouted.
Then I went back to my computer, grabbed my paperclip, and gently stuck it into a tiny hole in the CD drive. I poked around and then felt something push in. The drawer started coming out. Success!
I gleefully grabbed my CD and felt pretty smart. Well, certainly smarter than the "tech guy" at Microsoft anyway.
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