Here, Sip This Whiskey and Bite This Stick While We Cut Off Your Arm

You ever hear of the phrase, “Shooting yourself in the foot”…

I’ve essentially done the equivalent of that in the blog/mobile gadget world.

Allow me to explain:

I believe I’ve mentioned before that I carry a blackberry (though, not for long, and much to the chagrin of my wife, I talk non-stop about my next phone).

Here's my phone:





You like that shallow depth of field and selective focus on the shots of my phone??? Pretty sweet, I know.

Moving on.

So like a lot of smartphones, my blackberry requires an additional memory card for storage…most people just have the guy at the Verizon/AT&T/Sprint/T-Mobile/Cricket/USA Cellular/(sorry I’ve been reading a lot of phone stuff lately and just felt like naming the companies for some reason, get over it) store put in the card and you never think about it.

Well, like a lot of poor people, I can’t necessarily afford to have a guy do stuff for me and, as it turns out, it saves you (me) a bunch of money to simply open my phone and put a memory card into it myself.

Smartphones usually require this type of memory card



It’s called a “Micro-SD” card…I’ll save the technical details of it (mostly because I don’t know them) and just tell you that this thing is really fѱ©Ƙing small. So small, that they make a standard SD card adapter for it.

See how small?



Well, my phone had been acting up lately and I needed to upgrade the software on it and wanted to back up all the data I had saved on the micro-card. Smart move, no? Thanks, I pride myself on making smart moves.

My computer…



…actually comes with an internal SD card reader, but recently, due to my photography addiction, I bought myself a memory card reader…it connects via usb and can read all kinds of memory cards:



Up until the incident happened that I am purposefully dancing around telling, I had only used it for my big camera’s memory card which is not SD, but Compact Flash and it has worked perfectly and now it doesn’t take 3 days to upload my photos…

Well, it has a slot for a Micro SD card…I (stupidly)…(wait…I need to reopen these parentheses because, this is not the stupid part…there is a slot for the card I had and I chose to use it) thought, well, lets get some additional use out of the reader and use it for something else. Plus…I didn’t feel like digging around for the adapter…I know I have it, but I got the card so long ago, I might have a hard time finding it.

So there I go on my merry way offloading data from the memory card and moving along nicely. When I was done and needed to remove the card, I had some trouble…remember when I referred to me doing something stupid before?

Stage Hand: Cue the stupid!

The card is so small, that no matter how much you squeeze with your fingers, you can’t exert enough pressure to remove this thing easily from the deathly grips of the card reader. It also is not equipped with a little ejector or a push-in-to-release mechanism.

(there are WAY too many “That’s what she said’s” in there to even mention).

Stage Hand: STUPID! I CALLED FOR STUPID!

Okay, okay. I’ll try to get to the stupid. I looked around for something that could help provide the added pressure I needed to remove the card successfully so I could resume taking lots of stupid photos for all of you.

(Seriously, without the card in there, I can only fit about 20 total pics on my blackberry. And SAVE IT, iPhone users, I don’t want to hear anything you have to say).

And believe me, I’ve missed on a couple of gems! There was, for example, a truck I passed recently and it was hauling a piece of construction equipment. I know, who cares? Right? Well, you’d care when the equipment company is called:



My sincerest apologies, dear readers. I will (try to) not fail you like this again.

Stage Hand: QUIT STALLING! I called for Stupid and we’re behind! Get stupid out here NOW!

(I just saw Black Swan, so I think that’s why I’m thinking of a stage hand…good movie, kind of messed up…Gothika meets Fight Club…meets Pirates of the Caribbean (what with all the bones jumping and dancing everywhere) combined with all the anorexia of that Lifetime Movie with the Pink Power Ranger where all she ate was lettuce (don’t ask).

Sorry, I know I’m stalling on the stupid. Here we go.

When all my attempts to remove said MicroSD card from the reader failed…I resorted to tools. My dad used to always say, “Man is superior to animal by his ability to make and use tools.” The important thing about tools is you need to find the RIGHT tool for the job…even if you’re adapting a tool…you need something just tough enough, something with finesse, something that isn’t…well…going to crush the innards of your MicroSD card…oops, I gave away the punch line.

What tool did I think was the right one?

No, I’m not going to put a picture of me here…jerks.

This is what I thought would free my trapped flash memory card…






I was half right…well, all-right…I got the memory card out, see? It's back in my phone...right in there next to the SIM card...told you that thing is small!



But now I get this screen:






Sad.

Well, I’m off to Home Depot to find a good blade for the brain surgery I'm scheduled to perform later today. Should be fine…plus think of all that money I’ll save!

PS