I was unloading the washing machine tonight (I'm domesticated like that), and found a little present in the bottom. I'm notoriously bad about not emptying pockets before throwing pants in the washing machine [note: for those of you from the north, you may refer to this as the worshin' machine]. Normally, it's harmless stuff like loose change, which, by the way, makes a nice racket in the dryer for 40 minutes straight if you're too lazy like I am once you've moved on to the next room to actually walk back in and open up the dryer door to fish out the offending coins. Occasionally a few business cards make it in, too, only to come out in about a bagillion soggy little shreds... usually matted to a black shirt. The worst offender, though, is my wallet because it usually turns everything black. The good news when that happens? It generally means I get to buy new clothes. The bad news? I have to wait for my wallet, debit card and $ bills to dry out before I can go and then hope the debit card still works. So anyway, back to the point of this post. Tonight I found my trusty 128MB USB Flash drive in the bottom of the washing machine and assumed the worst. No way this baby's gonna still work!. Well, you can probably guess where this story's goin'. I plugged her in to my Mac, and she hesitated for a split second, but then worked like a champ. All the files I had on there before the 10 minute permanent press cycle were still there. Go figure. So here's my question... why is it that a super cheap, dumb little USB drive - something I could care less about in the grand scheme of things - can survive a full wash cycle submerged in water and come out smelling like roses (or at least Downy Clean Breeze fabric softener) when three drops of Coke on a laptop keyboard - a fine-tuned $3200 piece of computing horsepower - causes a catastrophic melt-down??