Help, My CD is stuck

This was about 10 years ago, when we still had some 486 computers without CD-ROM drives in a few of out labs.

A young lady asked for some help getting her CD out of the computer. No problem I think as I grab a handy-dandy CD removal tool, commonly called an unbent paperclip.

I ask her where she was working, she directs me to the lab with the oldest computers, those 486 machines without any CD-ROM drives i mentioned earlier.

I'm a bit confused, but I soldier on and ask her to direct me to the problematic computer.

This is going to be interesting I think to myself; The paperclip is NOT going to help.

She had managed to put the CD into the 5¼ inch disk drive.

HUH?!?!

I asked what she had done, she was just following her teacher's instructions.

When I asked why she didn't use one of the labs with the newer computers with the CD-ROM drives she told me that she had never used a computer before and didn't know any better. Why she didn't ask for help before is beyond me, but there are people like that.

I did my best to explain that we would have to dismantle the computer to get her CD out, and that it may not be usable once retrieved. She was upset and the prospect of losing her disk,

Well, not only did we have to remove the drive from the computer, a desktop case, we had to destroy the drive in the process.

She got her CD back, fortunately for her, it wasn't too damaged and worked properly in a computer with a CD-ROM drive.

Now we have a stack of CDs that people have forgotten in the labs