My Little Computer Scare

Tonight, my mom wanted me to take pictures of her old driver's license because she was going to the DMV to get her license renewed. Because my mom is a good driver, she was able to renew her license previously through the mail. Now, she has to go in to the DMV because the sticker on her license has expired.

The reason why she wanted me to take a picture of her license is because she's one of the very few people left in Illinois with the old-style license. In order to get her new license, she has to turn in her old one and she wanted a picture to remember it by.

I tried her digital camera first and it didn't work right. I went and got my camera instead and took some pictures. After I took a few, I took the camera back to my room. I took out the memory card and was all set to put it into the memory card reader on the front of my computer until I did the one thing I always feared I would...I put the card into the wrong slot.

The memory card reader on the front of my computer has the Compact Flash spot right below the Smart Media/XD slot. I put the XD card into the Compact Flash spot on accident and the card fell right into the reader. After trying a couple of tweezers, I realized that I was not going to be able to pull the card right out.

I was determined not to lose that memory card or have to take my computer to the shop and pay an annoying amount of money just to get it. I shut down my computer, unhooked everything, and took it out of my room. I put it on the floor of the living room and opened it for the first time.

I have not seen a computer of mine open since my friend Paul put memory in my old computer back in college. This was the first time I actually opened a computer all by myself.

I looked inside the computer with a flashlight and searched for the memory card. I found it...then I lost it again. I did find it again and realized it was in a very, very hard-to-reach spot. I carefully tried to get at it, making sure not to so much as move one wire out of place. Unfortunately, it wasn't budging. I then took a big risk and moved the computer around a bit. Just when I thought I was going to have to turn the whole thing upside down, the card fell to the bottom of the computer. I scooped it up and gave it to my mom for safe keeping.

With my computer open, I took the liberty of cleaning the dust out of it in the kitchen. After I did that, I put side panel back on and took it back to my room to hook it back up.

Once I hooked it back up, I hoped that it would work okay. It did.

Now, I plan to never use that memory card reader with any XD card again. Those things cost too much money for me to get another one stuck in my computer.

If anything useful comes from this incident, it's the fact that now I know how to open my computer at a moment's notice. But man, for a second there, I was scared about my computer.