Isn’t it weird how your memory fails you sometimes.
I use a USB memory stick on my keyring to carry files around with me - things like photographs, documents, and an encrypted copy of my password file.
The USB stick went missing last week. I looked in my backpack, in my work laptop bag, on the desk at home, on the desk in the office at work, in my coat pockets, and even went through the dirty washing.
Gone.
I wasn’t too worried about losing it because the password file was encrypted (and encrypted quite heavily), but still, I was annoyed because it was handy, and I used it a lot. So, this morning we went shopping in Reading, a nearby town and I bought a new USB memory stick (2 Gigabytes for under 20 pounds… amazing).
Don’t laugh.
On the way home, I was getting out of the car, gathering shopping bags together, when W passed me my sunglasses. “Here - take these back indoors - you’ll be wondering where they are”. I had no obvious place to tuck them, and didn’t want to put them on because I was about to go into the house - so I looked down myself for anywhere suitable to tuck them.
It just so happened that the sweater I pulled from the top of the ironing pile this morning has a zipped breast pocket.
Remember - I told you not to laugh.
As I reached for the zip, some winding path of neurons remotely connected to a memory from last weekend informed my brain that there might be something to remember about this pocket. I couldn’t quite remember what it might be, but after fishing around in the pocket with a finger, I detected something long and plastic. Something USB memory stick shaped.
I started laughing out loud.
“What are you laughing about?”
“You know I just bought that new USB Memory Stick”… at which point I held up the old one from my pocket. W nearly hit me with her bag of shopping.