apropos of anything

Back in December, my DVD player choked on my Gilmore Girls disc, thereby rendering itself useless as anything other than a space-filler in my entertainment center. Today, I finally did something about it. Or rather, Ken and Ivan did.

It began with the Great Screwdriver Hunt because of course I’d brought in the DVD player but no tools, naturally expecting my coworkers to pry the lid off with their bare hands. Luckily, Ivan keeps a screwdriver in his desk. Even more luckily, Rajul keeps an entire tool set in his desk. And even more luckily, we have a lab upstairs for stripping cables and the like, and it’s practically Home Depot up there!

Once we had the proper tools, Ken took off the casing protecting the circuitry inside the player. Before the two of us could blink, though, Ivan’s inner engineer took over, and he was sitting on the floor taking all the pieces apart. Ken helped by redirecting the desk lamp so we could all pretend Ivan was being interrogated. I helped by sitting on a chair and watching.

Eventually, he got to the part that held the disc, and we managed to slide the disc out. Having watched the deconstruction process, I was ready to toss the player because it seemed broken beyond repair, but Ivan still had hope. Or delusions, depending on how you look at it. He insisted on putting it back together to the point where we could see if it would work. He did. It didn’t. The tray would open but not close unless we manually pushed it, and then it made a horrible scraping noise that sounded like a dying robot from AI.

We still had to do some talking to convince Ivan to give up, but really, nobody who heard that machine “operate” would have thought there was any hope of salvaging it. So, for all of you who have been waiting with bated breath to hear the end of the DVD player saga: I got my disc (thanks, Ken and Ivan!), but I’m in the market for a new player.