My Reflection

I work in a law firm, and we deal with a lot of big documents. Often, these documents are sent off-site to be converted into PDF images and burned onto a CD. When these CDs come back, we stick them into the computer to make sure that they open the way they're supposed to, then we take them back to the client.

So one day a stack of CDs comes back in, and Kim picks them up and takes them over to the computer to check them out. I'm working on something else when she announces to nobody in particular (but to me because I was the only other person in the room) that she can't get the CD to function correctly.

So I walk over to the computer where she's at and get an "Unable to read disc in Drive D:" message. "You put the disc in the correct drive, right?"

"Yes, I stuck it in and that message popped up."

So I fiddled a little by trying to run the disc manually, but still got the same error. So I opened the drive, and there I was, staring at my reflection.

"The shiny side is supposed to go up in the drive right?"

Trying my best to bite my tongue and not completely lose it, I calmly said, "No, actually the label side is supposed to go up. Why don't I finish these, and you go work on something else?"

I know that CDs are a relatively new technology, having been around for only about, oh, 15 years or so. However, in those 15 years I've put a lot of CDs into a lot of CD players and into a lot of CD-ROM drives, and I can never recall one where the label side goes down. Ever.

I swear, I'm not making these up.