Gernsback, Beware!
I seem to have awoken from a dream which is at once both the best and worst one can have. Let me describe it for you.
I have spent some time among the denizens of a world described by the sensibility of its elements. It is a world of elegant technological achievement, a place where the engineering endeavors of women and men find purchase in reality and thrive. It is a world driven by cause and effect, such that once the effect of an act is known, it should evermore behave accordingly. This, dear friend(s), is the World of Tomorrow!
It is a world, in short, in which one might expect the name-brand CD drive installed in a name-brand x86 machine to function as if it hadn’t also been designed to test my patience.
You see, I have this crazy idea that ejecting a music CD from a CD player, whether said player exists as a component of a computer system, or as its own standalone system, should result in the CD being accessible to human digits. If I push eject, the fucker should be—how you say?—ejected.
Not in this world, ma’ams and sirs. In this world, a world in which light rain cripples the useful vehicular cognizance of otherwise car-worthy folk, a world wherein governments pay farmers to not farm—in this world, pushing eject on this particular peecee results in some of a grab-bag of possible effects:
- the ejection of the medium
- the fixing of the CD drive’s light in an “on” state, and subsequent cycles of approximately 2 minutes of complete system paralysis punctuated by 20-second bursts of “activity”
- the launching of the generally horrible “interactive content” found on some of today’s CD’s, followed by the fixing of the CD drive’s light in an “on” state, and subsequent cycles of approximately two minutes of complete system paralysis punctuated by 20-second bursts of “activity”
Sure, I’ll give you that this at least keeps things interesting. There’s no denying that that two seconds after hitting eject really moistens my palms. It’s not a little nerve-wracking. All the same, I’d just as soon not need to shut the whole damn thing down just so I can start—ahem—working again.
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