I had been making some personal backups of my DVDs this evening when I decided to pop one in to make sure everything looked OK. In my office I have a little 26" LCD with an internal DVD player so I stuck one of the copies into the TV when a heard a very unfriendly grinding. It's widely documented that I'm not a hardware expert, but even my untrained ear told me that this was a bad noise to be coming from the player.

Sure enough, the player soon spit the disc right back out at me. I tried a few more times (yeah, like that was gonna work) to no avail when I decided I'd grab a screwdriver and take the thing apart to see if I could get lucky and fix the thing.

As I started to work on the 58 or so screws that held this amazing little player together I began to hear a familiar rattle. The kind of rattle that only the actions of a mischievous toddler can produce. Before I'd even removed the cover I already knew what to expect. Sure enough when I finally got the thing open my suspicions were confirmed:

Thankfully once the offending currency was removed and the device was reassembled it returned to it's previous working state.