• Sally Flynn (unregistered) in reply to Steve_The_Cynic

    Yes, CDs may have been around for a decade by the mid-90s, but a lot of music was still sold on cassette at that time.

  • JDub (unregistered)

    As someone who's done tech support before, major props to the customer for volunteering the question of which side was up. Getting information from people is too often like pulling teeth.

  • blah (unregistered) in reply to tumblr

    clicking on 'eject' flushes pending writes that may exist in the memory cache for that drive, waits for them to be flushed, and then unmounts the filesystem correctly. You may not corrupt your filesystem by pulling a disk that's idle without first ejecting but it's not the same thing.

  • Rob J (unregistered)

    If we want weak 'stories' like this, there's a whole archive of them on www.techtales.com going back over 20 years!

  • HK-47 (unregistered) in reply to spaceman

    You call yourself “spaceman”? As in someone aspiring to go to space? With that mentality you should dive back into that primordial mud puddle you crawled out of. You are not worthy of having “man” as part of your name and the “space” part clearly describes the ice cold vacuum you have in your head instead of brain.

    Do everyone a favor and space yourself.

  • Stuart Longland (unregistered) in reply to Sally Flynn

    … and in about 20 years, when Sonny encounters his great great grandad's CD player and collection of CDs… the fun will start all over again because he and his parents have never seen a CD before.

  • (nodebb) in reply to HK-47

    Do everyone a favor and space yourself.

    Sorry, but that's over the line.

  • (nodebb)

    I've seen a Hi-Fi CD player that took its CD shiny-side-up (was easy to spot, its tray looked like a record player instead of being hollow). I don't remember why we ended up quickly replacing it, but I doubt it was related to that issue.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Abe Z.

    Yeah, they should totally reprise it next time they do a rerun.

  • The Original Frits (unregistered)

    Of all the shit that hasn't happened, the shit in this story didn't happen the most. Especially the "like a gramophone record" bit - that bit didn't happen so hard it broke the scale.

  • TCCPhreak (unregistered)

    I know I'm late to the party but I can also confirm that there are Hifi-CD-Players that need the disc to be "upside-down" to work. Husband of my mother has one of those. It seems old but is still in use-

    Maybe in the beginning of the CD era some manufacturers wanted the transition to be easier by really being "just like record players"; later on they decided that being able to read the cover in the open try might be nice. Maybe it was easier to rest the whole disc on a spinning surface instead of just the center. Maybe laser electronics were too big to fit under the disc instead of above it. Either way: those drives exist.

    So maybe the customer in that case was used to one of those upside-down-players. In any case: If you're doing Tech Support for CD installations (whether by Job description, by choice or by being roped into it), this should be on the "things-to-check"-list. Kudos to the customer for thinking "where could our assumptions differ?" - more than the support.

    Regards,

    TCC

  • Mark Whybird (unregistered)

    We had an end user once who couldn't understand why our software on CD didn't do anything when put in the car's CD player.

    I mean, she had a CD player in her car (super modern at the time), but didn't get that a CD might be something other than Audio.

  • Mike (unregistered)

    This reminds me of when, once a person found out I was a computer programmer, I would be asked "My AOL is being weird. Do you know AOL?" My answer: NO!!!!!

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