I try my hardest to ignore suggesting advertising. “If you bought that, you might also like this!” Sometimes they are right and sometimes they are wrong and that’s not the point. I would like to think that I am capable of purchasing what I want and only what I want. (Notice that I said “want” and not “need.” I didn’t “need” a life-size skeleton, I just wanted one.)

i bought some things online last year and as I checked out I got the prompt. I think it said, “other people who purchased this item also bought these.” Below that was a link to a 32 gigabyte USB thumb drive. Two things caught my attention: the thumb drive’s size (which is tiny) and the price (which was $10). I bought two of them.

Here’s one of the thumb drives, next to a quarter.

On the upper right-hand side of the thumb drive is a small plastic loop. Both thumb drives came with a lanyard that you could attach to the loop to prevent you from losing it. Both plastic loops broke almost immediately. In another example of “you get what you pay for,” the “metal USB part” fell out of the “blue plastic part” on both drives. In both cases I had to figure out how to reassemble the drives and get the innards oriented in the right direction. A drop of super glue has prevented that from reoccurring.

I use one of these drives in my drone. I can record video directly to USB. I use the other to move files to and from computers. I have a lot of stuff on it.

About a month ago, I lost it. That’s something I hadn’t considered about buying a USB thumb drive this small. I’ve been checking pants pockets, backpack flaps, and clutter piles everywhere. It just disappeared. With a bunch of “stuff” on it. Depending on your point of view, 32 gigs of data is either “almost nothing” or “a ton of space.” I suppose the size is less important than the contents.

While cleaning out some drawers last night, the drive turned up. When I plugged it into the computer I found that it contained nothing important — a few mp3s and some files I had moved from one machine to another. Still, the thought of losing it has had me searching high and low for the stupid thing for a month now, wondering what its fate was. (I was pretty sure it had fallen behind something, never to be seen again.)