Sneaky bastards

Being the nerd that I am, I carry around a USB flash drive for miscellaneous data transfers. It's a nice little thumb-sized 512Mb thingy and it's served me well.

The other day, I needed to copy a file to it and it was gone. I searched my knapsack, my desk and my office at work and the thing couldn't be found. Eventually, I concluded I must have lost it somewhere and wrote it off.

Now, I have a spare as well, but that one seems to have also vanished on me. I'm pretty sure it's in the apartment, but I don't know where in the apartment it is and I do need one, so I figured that I was justified in buying a replacement. I ended up dropping twenty-five bucks(!) on a 1-Gig(!) drive made by a company whose name is just different enough from Kingston to keep from getting sued.

This is a physically tiny drive. It's the size of a small stick of gum--Trident, not Wrigley's--that's been flattened a bit and has had a third or so chopped off. It doesn't have a plug. Instead, it's the size and shape of the plastic tongue in the middle of a USB plug and it just sort of sticks into a USB port.

It came in a big, flimsy plastic tube, presumably to keep it from getting lost, and a big floppy lanyard was included. In the car, I took it out of the tube and attached the lanyard immediately, before I could drop the thing and lose it forever. Then I put it in my knapsack, in the compartment where I kept the other USB drive.

I bet you can guess what happened next.

As soon as I opened the compartment, the one I'd previously searched pretty carefully, I saw the old drive. My theory is that it got lonely and decided to trick me into buying it a companion. And it worked, too.

But really, what could I do? (Return the new drive? But it's soooo cool!)

I stuck the new drive in with the old and drove on to Tim Horton's to get a cup of coffee. As I got back in the car, coffee in hand, I saw a little rubbery sleeve on the seat. It was just the right size for the new drive so I concluded that it must have been in the tube and fallen out unnoticed when I opened it. I grabbed it, got in the car and opened my knapsack. The new drive and the old drive were lying side-by-side, lanyards wrapped around each other.

I pulled them apart and put the sleeve over the new drive. Then I zipped the little compartment shut again and went on my way. I don't really care what they do in the dark but if they start spreading viruses, I'll be pissed.

#   Posted 2006-12-08 15:10:00 UTC; last changed 2006-12-08 15:30:00 UTC