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>Once he freaked out in a meeting because a CD did not work in the CD player, so he took the CD out and smashed it in to pieces on the conference room table. The IT guy , who was standing behind him, ended up going to the hospital because the shards from the CD flew into his eyes

Did the author of this article ever try breaking a CD? They don't shatter like that and the shards certainly aren't gonna fly far enough to hit the guy behind you. I guess this is what happens when you report exclusively on gossip.



> try breaking a CD? They don't shatter like that and the shards certainly aren't gonna fly far

We once tried to bend a CD. It took a fair amount of effort but the opposite outer edges almost touched. Lots of small cracks appeared and there was ominous creaking… When pushed a little further, I think the edges did touch first, but for a fraction of a second before ¡CRACK!, the disk did shatter - there were two large parts (the outer quarters by width, approximately) remaining, a few other chunks, and the rest was a cloud of small parts liberally sprayed around the room. We were finding them for months afterwards, and some were sharply pointed. Even without a sharp point such a fragment would cause significant irritation if in contact with the eye just like any large particulate, and I certainly wouldn't want bits hitting the eye at the speed they must have been moving to spread as far as they did.

While the smashing-CD-on-the-table is very obviously apocryphal, perhaps holding one side on the edge of the desk and impacting the other with significant momentum (with a hammer?), or perhaps wedging it in place & kicking, could result in a snap what would also spray matter like this?

Also, if that sentence is meaning he smashed the CD player on the desk rather than the disk then I can certainly imagine small parts flying around, if only bits from the plastic casing.


Having once found myself in a room with a hard tile floor, sound-dampening paneling, and a very large stack of old CD-ROMs that were to be thrown away, I can assure you that if you work on your technique over a few dozen iterations, you can reliably get them to shatter very nicely into little bitty shards.


The whole CD doesn't shatter, but the edges of the break do. To see this effect on steroids, put a CD through a shredder: a common security procedure. You're playing Russian Roulette with your eyeballs if you don't wear eye protection when doing this.


What on earth are you doing that's causing this? I've never seen a shredded do anything other than chop a CD into little strips.


I personally broke many CDs, it's kinda hard to do but when they snap small bits from broken edges fly off everywhere. I even saw CD that broke inside of drive. Granted it was put in with a crack in the middle but still it broke. Maybe it's just my feeling but I think that CDs back in the days was made out of a bit less flexible, ticker and more brittle plastic. Those produced today I can bend in half and they don't snap as easily as 20 years ago


It sounds like you, and the people replying to you, haven’t broken enough different CDs in different ways to be aware that there are many different ways they can shatter. Some are more rigid than others and will shatter hard and you can absolutely lose an eye.


I sense ambiguity in the sentence: "a CD did not work in the CD player, so he took the CD out and smashed it in to pieces"

Did he smash the CD or the CD player? What was "it"?


I used to break cds into a plastic bag because of all the little pieces that go flying around and difficult to clean up.




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