Reason to Smile

Several years ago, the CD player in my car starting acting up. From time to time, it would decide to stop playing and would essentially kidnap (refuse to eject) the CD inside. When this happened, I would press the eject button a few times, then give up until later. Generally, I would start the car up subsequent to this, and the CD would eject on its own. Then, everything would work fine for a while until it pulled this stunt again.

Then it finally decided to stop doing this. That is, it shut down for good, unfortunately with a CD still inside. It really wasn't that big of a deal, as I would soon purchase my first iPod and make it a moot point. The CD was a burned copy anyway, so I got my friend to make me another one. Eventually, I would purchase--or, actually, my sister would give me for Christmas--that particular CD.

This morning, on my way to work, I looked down and noticed the display on the player said "Pause". Since the display had stopped working when the player shut down, I realized this was unusual, so I pressed eject, and out came the CD. I was quite pleasantly surprised by this development. A few minutes later, I decided to take a chance and try to play the CD, but nothing happened when I inserted it. It still ejected though, so I figured that either the CD was no longer any good, or it was just too cold.

I got to work and popped it into my computer's CD player and it worked. Now, I still need to find out if the CD player is working again, but I'm more amused at this development than anything. That particular CD was my #1 album of 2004, and it was Christmas of that year that my sister gave it to me, which was definitely after the player had devoured it. So, it had been stuck in there for over four years.

The CD in question (which I'm listening to right now): Brian Wilson's Smile.