Flash Stupidity

The latest of what my mother likes to call "Robbie stories" happened Thursday morning while I was starting work. Picture my desk in your mind's eye. Next to the computer monitor is a mug full of pens and markers. In it is also a flash drive, hooked onto a key ring with a big plastic dingus on it. The flash drive contains a presentation my boss is supposed to give today, two days later, and which we have been working on for several weeks. Beside the pen mug is another mug full of hot tea that I have just set down. Got that picture?

Now picture me reaching into the first mug for a Sharpie permanent marker, which I always stash point-downward so that the ink runs toward the tip. As I pull the Sharpie out of the mug, the clip on its cap becomes hooked on the plastic dingus attached to the flash drive's key ring. Up comes the flash drive, borne aloft by the pen clip, only to fall off and drop straight into my mug of hot tea.

Whoops.

Thought you'd like to hear about it. It's the kind of story I often share, the kind folks often laugh at. I was laughing at it by the end of the day - after a panicked call to IT, a long rinse-off under the water tap, and anxious hours of waiting for the flash drive to drip/wick/evaporate dry on a bed of paper towels at the sunny end of my desk. Bless the heavens, it still worked when I plugged it in 10 hours later. Everything was still on it.

Realistically, I would only have lost a couple of JPEGs that had been added since the last time I backed up the flash drive on my Windows desktop. But it still felt like I had dodged a bullet. A bullet propelled, as always, by my own invincible stupidity!