Back at the office from Zimbabwe, I was asked to go install a computer and a word processor at the home of a very prominent consultant.

He had bought a computer but he needed to install a 5.2” disk drive and more memory. While I put the computer together (a desktop with the 5.2 floppy disk drive, monitor, keyboard and mouse), the consultant wife was attentively watching and asking questions.

Once I installed the software, the consultant sat at the computer and we started the training. I showed him the basics, including how to insert the diskettes and lock them in the drive.

Everything went quite smooth and I went back to the office.

That visit to install and train this consultant provided me with my first time to see real lightening bugs in a North Carolina forest. It was like a dream to be surrounded by tiny lights flying gently near me in the gathering dusk.

As soon as I came to the office, they told me that the wife of the consultant had called. I needed to call back immediately. As soon as I said “Hello”, the consultant agitatedly said, “The computer is eating the diskettes!”

I tried to imagine what could be happening. He was too upset to make sense. So I asked him if I could talk to his wife who had been quietly listening, in the back, to all my instructions during my visit. I asked her to explain the situation, and she said that her husband had been inserting diskettes one by one, but he could not see the drive letter on the screen or take out the diskette from the computer. I asked her if they were close to the computer and, when she said yes, I told her to describe everything he was doing. The same thing happened. He inserted a diskette and nothing showed on the screen and he could not take it out either.

So I asked her “Where exactly is he inserting the diskette? Is it in a slot with a little handle to lock it? She said, “No the slot does not have any handle; it is just a slot.”

Then the light came on in me. Mystery solved! He was inserting the diskettes in the crack between the disk drive and the computer chassis, not inside the drive.

It was a tiny slot between the cover and the disk drive, and, there, her husband had, with great effort, fed the diskettes. So I asked her to tell him to open the disk drive moving the handle up then insert the disk and then lock it. The green drive letter showed on the screen, together with the cursor.

After his wife had a good laugh, and since she had seen me putting the computer together, I asked if she was brave enough to open the desktop box, and she said yes. I had used plastic bolts to make it easy to open the cover of the motherboard, CPU, diskette drives, memory chips, etc., so she did. She found 3 diskettes right on top of the disk drive.

After they replaced and screwed the cover back, only to be sure, I asked her to cover the devouring slot with some duct tape.