MINNEAPOLIS — A local man’s CD-RW containing Papa Roach’s album “Infest” pleaded for its dear life for him to give it a second chance, sources who forgot it even existed confirmed.
“Just because I was downloaded from LimeWire and the songs are all out of order doesn’t make me any less useful than if you bought the real thing for $9.99 in the bargain bin at Tower Records,” said the storage medium. “If I have to be associated with this album, someone should have to suffer along with me. And hey, I’m just as good as I was 20 years ago. First though, I need some help extricating myself from between these smudged-up copies of Drowning Pool’s second and third albums. It’s a rough life I lead.”
Jake Swenson, the disc’s owner, was not empathetic of the compact disc.
“That beat-up Memorex in my truck’s CD visor?” Swenson said. “Sorry bro, my burner broke back in 2002 when I tried ripping some sketchy Hoobastank MP3s. It’s the only reason I stopped using it. Also, because these things are obsolete and I haven’t thought about Papa Roach since the Bush administration. Man, if I was that CD I’d get with the program and offload myself to Goodwill or something, let it be someone else’s problem.”
Experts say it’s common for CD-RWs to never get any sort of redemption.
“It’s too risky to reuse a rewritable compact disc because in a sense the CD-RW could ‘die bleeding’ if a buffer underrun were to occur,” said Arthur Dillon, who once ran Netscape site “Burn and Learn” as a resource for those struggling to rip CDs from iTunes. “Subsequent re-writes are usually rife with mistakes by the creator, including using awful-quality 64kps MP3s or accidentally ejecting the disc at 99% done. Best case scenario at this point is the disc falling out of the CD visor, laying in the sun for an extended period, and degrading the recording so severely as to render it, for all intents and purposes, blank. At this point, that thing needs to be put out of its misery.”
At press time, a good Samaritan with a semi-working Windows 98 machine at home was seen breathing on the disc and rubbing it with their shirt in hopes of reviving the copy for one last go-around.