In one fell swoop, I became, "that guy".
While out in LA recently, I got this cool thumb drive from the Adobe Max Conference. Okay, I got like, three or four thumb drives from the Adobe Max Conference. Apparently that’s the schwag du jour this year. A couple of them were really cool, like the TokiDoki one we all got in our “goodie bags”. One of them that stood out however, was a nice, 2-gigabyte little blue fold up thumb drive from Neotys, a web application performance and stress testing company. Now, I’ve had thumb drives for years. I think the first one I got was a little 32 megabyte drive that came with an old Dell laptop I bought in the early 21st century. They all seemed pretty useless until recently, when people would give you 2 and 4 gigabyte drives. That’s enough to throw a couple movies on, or a handful of comics, maybe a book or twelve… perhaps a couple of websites you’re working on. You get the picture. Suddenly you’ve got this little drive that’s capable of actually carrying around… you know, useful shit.
So my great idea was that now I was going to start trying to carry it around with me. You know, make it more convenient. The idea being, maybe if I had it handier (is that even a word? handier?) I would use it more. The ol’ “force myself to use it by virtue of the fact that it’s constantly tethered to me” plan. I would get one of those keychains that had the quick release thingamabob that would allow me to carry my thumb drive around with me and whip it out whenever a data/space/hard drive emergency presented itself. There I’d be, in the middle of some crazy ass conversation with someone who had some pressing 1 gigabyte emergency, but never fear, look what I have! Then in a flash, I’d have my ass kicking two gigabyte keychain-fob-thumbdrive and I’d save the day.
After asking around (“Hey, where can I get a cool quick release keychain? Anyone know?”) I decided to stop over at Lowes on the way back to the office during lunch. I sauntered over to the keychain accessory rack (yes, there IS such a thing) and there it was, the object of my desire. Once I got this baby back to the office and got everything set up, I’d be the fucking man! I hurried up front, impatiently made it through the checkout and sped back to the office to get this show on the road. Got back, transferred all my keys off of that shitty, useless, single ring I had them on before (what was I thinking? The only thing that was good for was keys. I had much bigger plans now…) and stood back to marvel at my newfound heroic usefulness.
Then I put it in my pocket… or rather, “forced its bulk into the front of my pants”.
Quickly, before anyone walked in and saw me, I quietly transferred all my keys back to my remarkably svelt, simply executed “key ring”. You know, the one that’s a ring… that’s designed to hold keys?
So if you’re ever out and about and you find yourself in a tough spot and you just HAVE to get your hands on a quick 2 gigabytes of hard drive space, I’m afraid you’re shit out of luck.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go return this cape I bought…
