On the one hand, that's wonderful! But on the other hand, now we'll never know what /Trash was all about.
As was implied by my earlier post, when I experimented by moving the Evernote installer .dmg to the Trash
with the disk image already mounted, I saw exactly what was displayed in Rita's screen shot. I've confirmed that this isn't some anomaly specific to Evernote by producing the same result by dragging other .dmgs to the Trash while their disk images are mounted.
Furthermore, when I unmount such a disk image and then go to empty the Trash, I get the Finder icon bouncing in the Dock, alerting me to the presence of a
The operation can’t be completed because the item “whatever.dmg†is in use alert. This really should be a modal alert: that is, it should be displayed in front of all windows so you can't miss it.
Instead, it only comes to the front if
you're already in Finder when it's generated. If you empty the Trash by right-clicking or control-clicking the Trash icon in the Dock, the alert is layered behind the active app's windows. Even worse, if you respond to the bouncing Finder icon in the Dock by clicking on that icon, the alert is
immediately hidden by the new Finder window generated by that click! (If you've already got one or more Finder windows open, the alert is layered behind that or those window(s).)
And to top it off, once the alert exists, further attempts to empty the Trash (which you can't then do from Finder's File menu, because the command is, correctly, dimmed) via its Dock icon don't generate any "illegal action" feedback: The Empty Trash command in the contextual menu is not dimmed, which has to be considered a bug, and there's no alert sound produced.
So it's entirely possible that Rita's actions produced such an alert, which she never saw, and that all the various empytings of the Trash in fact did nothing at all.
By the way, you probably should have told her to
Eject the mounted disk image in Disk Utility rather than
Unmounting it; then emptying the Trash would have worked as expected.
