Long Lost Post: Office Hazards

If I was to keep track of how much of my writing I'd lost due to my failure to save, Internet/computer crashes and not keeping personal copies of website assignments, I would cry. Daily. Luckily, thanks to services like waybackmachine, I can find some of what I've lost. (Not that I'm sure it's all worth saving.) With that in mind, here's something originally posted on May 12, 2008:

The disk drive to my computer is broken.

Well, I guess it's just kind of broken — it isn't completely non-functional. It still opens sporadically, there's just no guarantee as to how many times I'll have to push the keyboard button that makes it pop out before it opens. It could be three punches, and it could be twenty-seven.

(Incidentally, my computer also started making some really strange sounds on Tuesday, and without a MAC specialist, no one's been able to fix it yet. The noises are driving me somewhat insane — which one of the IT guys pointed out as "being a short trip" — and I whole-heartedly look forward to repairs being made and silence, glorious silence. I tell you this so that as you're reading your June issue of Lipstick, you'll know what I had to go through right at deadline. My life is so hard. What with my nice office, air conditioning and zero back-breaking physical labor, I have it rough.)

Also, in addition to pushing the keyboard button, I have to hold the little door down on the disk drive to get the CD-Rom slot to pop out. Now, the CD-Rom slot is made of plastic and probably weighs less than the magazine, yes? And it could hardly be said that the slot zooms out — it's not like there's a lot of speed behind it.

So, basically, the CD-Rom slot on my computer poses no threat to me whatsoever. And it's certainly not a striking snake or a sharp-bladed throwing star. If it hits my hand, it's won't even leave a pink mark. Yet, every single time I open my computer's disk drive, I jerk my hand backwards when I hear the CD-Rom slot start to move.

What is up with that? I mean, I know I'm a wimp (you can ask several doctors who've tried to approach me with needles and my high school soccer coach about that one), but this is pretty ridiculous, even for me.

Plus, I open my disk drive all the time. You'd think that all the times it doesn't hurt me would have conditioned me into less-spastic behavior. But no. It hasn't happened yet. 

Anyone out there have some irrational fears or strange habits to make me feel better?