Where is the EXIT?

I am talking about the almost obsolete floppy disk. I have known it to be one of the most unreliable of digital media that I have personally used.

Right now I am looking after an internet cafe. Sathy, my friend, who owns a browsing centre near my place asked me to take care of his cafe since the usual worker was on a holiday. A customer came along, saved some document in his system and asked me for a diskette to store it on. I turned around to the shelf and took a CD, but he was like "NO! Give me one of those floppy diskettes!" CDs cost lesser than floppies, but maybe this chap did not have a CD drive in his destination or who knows what, he wanted his data in a floppy and I was only too happy to oblige.

I have come across a lot of people who chose to use floppies to CDs even though both cost almost the same and the only drawback in using CDs is that you need a CD writer which is usually not present in systems more than two years old here, unless it had been specially ordered. They usually keep a floppy for a few months and after that, attempt to retrieve the data in them. They would be lucky if it was intact.

The year was 2003. I was in the twelfth standard in my school and it was the time of the year when we have the customary farewell. I had planned some cartoons and animations to be displayed on a LCD projector and had painstakingly designed some cartoons and other stuff to go in hand with some of the onstage events. I stored the same in TEN floppies, with separate archives for each file and each floppy had two copies of the same data. And with the function about to start in ten minutes, I inserted the floppies, one after the another and you know what happened...

All ten failed.

Damn.

I did not know the reason, maybe I accidentally brought it near some magnetic material, but I was so annoyed that I tore each one down and threw it in disgust. I managed to run the show with some on-the-spot crappy looking development(The original system was in my cousin's place some 18 kms away so couldn't take an immediate backup :-( anyway)

I haven't used a floppy since. I am always amused to find people still using them and throwing up their arms in disgust if it fails on them! But they still keep using them, but floppies are definitely on their way out now! Good bye good ol' Floppy Disk!