My CD player has eaten my CD. I only got it last week. Still, it wasn't that good. But it would have been nice to listen to it, say, three times.

I spent a merry hour yesterday removing two dozen screws from the thing, separating out the four(I think I mean six) walls of the case from each other without giving myself any electric shocks from the power supply or cabling. This did help remove another CD which had got lost inside the casing, which was good, I suppose. However the CD machinery proved impossible to remove, being screwed firmly into the bottom of the case, with tape deck, radio and clock thingies all cable-knitted together above it and screwed onto the walls.

So there I am, holding six bits of casing, all refusing to come apart and no matter how i jab the CD player lurking at the bottom, it refuses to yield up my CD. Plainly, only a hammer or pickaxe or pneumatic drill is going to solve the problem.

So I put it all back together again, again without electrocuting myself and with ONLY two screws and a couple of other strange fixtures left over afterwards. And strangely, when I powered it up again, it continued to work in the same way it had before. Even without the two screws and despite having been pulled apart, held upside down, shaken a bit and poked and prodded. And the CD eject button still didn't work.

Then the kids came home and I had more sensible things to do.

Tags: broken things