Disintipating* CDs

Last Friday, while I was busy supervising the learning center and Holli was typing away in the next room with the door open, I suddenly heard, in rapid succession, a bang, a clatter, and a squeal. I promptly investigated.

"What happened?" I asked Holli, who had scooted away from her computer.

"I don't know. I think maybe the CD exploded. I was just typing away."

"That's what it sounded like, but I didn't know that could happen."

"Shall I open the CD drawer?"

"Sure. If it works."

Holli pressed the button and the drawer opened to reveal fragments of Mavis Beacon's smiling face scattered among the pieces of the label-covered CD. Hardly any of the pieces were bigger than my thumbnail.

"We'd better unplug it. Who knows where all those pieces went?"

I dismissed Holli from her makeup typing lesson.

"When the CD explodes you don't have to do the lesson?" she asked, smiling, on her way out to the basketball game in progress.

Our principal looked at it later and removed the CD drive from the CPU case (I don't know the proper name for this.) He shook it and more CD pieces rained down. Then he took it apart and got it thoroughly cleared out. After it was back in the case, he started it up again and inserted another Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing CD.

"It's working," he said. "No it isn't. I'm not sure what we've got here."

Now you know. CDs can spontaneously self-destruct. And whenever it's a typing program CD, you get to skip the lesson for the day, if it happens while you're using it.

*Disintipate is a word coined by a former hay-crew coworker of my brother Caleb's--someone whose speaking vocabulary and cognitive function sometimes experienced a bit of dissonance, with occasionally delightful results like the word "disintipate.