All I Ever Needed to Know about Electronics Repair, I Learned in Kindergarten

A funny thing happened to me today. The CD/DVD drive on my computer has been acting funny for some time, and finally today it decided to quit opening all together. A DVD drive is pretty useless if you can't put a disk in it, so I figured I had nothing to lose by tearing into it and trying to find the problem. I somehow managed to get it out of the computer and get the guts out of it without breaking anything or injuring myself. Of course, once inside I saw nothing obviously wrong. So I blew the dust out of it, put it back together, and crossed my fingers that a good cleaning was all it needed. I got the computer all plugged back in, fired it up, and hit the eject button. It worked!!! ..... once. That's right, it opened once, closed once, and that was all she wrote.

So, I spent the next 5 minutes with a steak knife trying to find the proper combination of prying and button pushing to get the sucker open again. Eventually, I found that the necessary procedure included one push of the eject button followed immediately by a firm one finger smack right in the "DVD" emblem on the front of the CD tray. It then occurred to me that all I ever needed to know about electronics repair, I learned in kindergarten. I've been smacking electronic devices ever since I was a kid watching Bugs Bunny on a 13 inch black and white TV with rabbit ears. So, thanks are in order to dad for teaching me at an early age the fundamentals of electronics repair. He taught me that most electrical gizmos need to be reminded who's the boss from time to time. It's surprising how a quick sucker punch will make most of them fall in line instantly. Even if it doesn't, I still feel better after taking some aggression out. I guess the moral of the story is that sometimes even the most complicated of problems often has a simple solution. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.