So there I sat at my desk in the waning minutes of 2008, staring at my Zune music player and kicking myself in the butt. That morning, I happened to see on my MSN home page that thousands of Zune music players were freezing up when they were powered on. Now, most people would immediately see this as either some sort of time based-virus, or a time-based software glitch that would most likely affect ALL Zune players, right? But me? Heck no! I couldn’t wait to fire mine up to see if, for some reason, I had managed to procure that one that was free of the plague. Well, my Zune did exactly what every other Zune on the planet was doing, which was to immediately lock up.

So, as an engineer, what do you suppose the first thing going through my mind was? You got it! “I’ll just pop this puppy open and get her runnin’ again.” (Why shouldn’t I be able to accomplish in a few minutes what all of Microsoft’s resources had not been able to fix all day?)

My decisions were definitely getting worse as the day more on. By now, I suppose you are wondering why a flex circuit guy would be rambling about his music player on the Tech Thoughts blog. Flex circuits, of course! The Zune is full of them. It just goes to show that when you need to make lots of connections and you have very little room to make them, flex circuits are the answer.

At this point, I figured that I was seriously voiding any warranty on this gadget, so I put it back together. After reassembling the unit (with no leftover parts!), I went online to discover that the “fix” was to just leave it alone until the next day. I guess that when the Zunes figured out that it was 2009, they just fixed themselves. Now if only our economy could do the same….