My favorite thing was messing with the metal slider until it broke.

I think in the later dying days of the floppy disk, the manufacturers made them with really poor quality. It used to be in earlier years, say the 8-bit years when floppy disks were still floppy, that the disks could keep your data for years if you treated them like vinyl records and never touched the magnetic surface.

In the late years, I've seen floppy disks that failed almost immediately.

They weren’t that bad. Hell AOL mailed millions of those damn things in envelopes and they usually worked.

Had a teacher one time draw a grid on her whiteboard with a space for each student, and she asked us to place our disks with our projects on the board with a magnet (so we wouldn't lose them). The school had recently gotten rid of the old dusty chalkboard, and was really enamored with her new whiteboard and showing off her fridge magnet collection.

Luckily, someone pointed out why that was a bad idea before anyone did it, and she quickly changed her mind.