I'd laughed too. I don't deny it. I remember years ago watching a video of a computer where the end user was sticking the CDs in the crack above the CD-ROM. Laughed my butt off, then it happened to me. End user says the computer was keeping their CDs. Took it apart to find all these CDs floating around the case.
CD's?? C'mon. Why ya gota throw down with the new fangly tech stuff? Let's go back in time to the days of floppies. No, not those floppies. Go back even further. I'm talking 5 1/4 floppies.(if you were thinking 8 inchers, you went too far come back a little ways)
The time? Well, it's the age of 5 1/4 floppies. The place? A Home Depot in the DFW area. You know those nifty machines that match paint color? Well they of course need software to run. And that software like all good software gets updated now and again. And since nobody in any corporate board room outside of silicon valley knows what the internet is yet, the sw updates get mailed to each store on a 5 1/4 floppy. A new update comes in and the heap of the paint department gets called back to the computer room and handed the floppy. And told to go install the update on the machine.
See the problem there? A little light on the instructions. Luckily, the paint Manager knows his limitations and asked for further detailed instructions. "Just put the floppy in the drive and it will update automatically." Good thing the people who designed the machine realized the end users wouldn't be the most tech savy and made the update process as simple as they could and almost Luddite proof.
Several minutes later, a phone call comes in from the paint dept.
"It's not doing anything."
"Hmmm, you put the floppy in the drive and it didn't update automatically?"
"Yep."
"Hmmm, take it out and put it back in again."
"Okay." Pause ensues.
"Still not doing anything."
"When you close the drive door does it make noise?"
"Sure does."
"Strange. It's should start the update automatically. Go ahead and bring the disk back and I'll try to check it in the computer back here."
"OK."
Several minutes later, the department head returns to the computer room. But he has something different than what he left with.
"What's that?"
"It's the disk you gave me."
And the manger proceeds to hold up a very thin round piece of brown plastic.
"What?"
"It's the disk you gave me."
"When I gave it to you, wasn't it inside of a square thing?"
"The wrapper? I threw that in the trash. Do you still need it?"
"Uhh, yeah. It won't work without it."
"Oh. Sorry. Can you have Headquarters fax us a new one?"
Yep. I don't think I've ever questioned the possibility of the survival of humans as a species as much as I did that day. Honestly, the guy can be forgiven for not understanding the workings of a floppy drive, but to confuse a fax machine with a Star Trek transporter is beyond what I can do.
I guess we need to invoke Clarke's 3rd law:
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
