Not AGAIN!

Let me me straightforward. I left my pen-drive in the washing machine, again. This is the second time, I’ve forgotton to take out storage devices out of pockets (Thank GOD, it’s NEVER happened to my iPod!). This pen-drive was a 2GB Transcend V80. Y’know, the small black one. Karthick gave it to me on my birthday. I was pretty worried it wouldn’t work. But I knew most pen-drives don’t die after tumble dries.

In fact, Dad was having some trouble with the washing machine. There was too much foam in the drum, even after giving it a final spin dry. So he had to wash it again, and spin it again. Two such cycles. After Dad made the horrifying discovery, I attempted to wipe it clean, and being wise, did NOT stick it into a PC at the first opportunity, saving both the PC and pen drive.

I left it out to dry with the clothes. ;-P

Then after about an hour, it hadn’t dried properly, so I toook a hair dryer and attempted to blow dry it. Basically, I could only dry the USB port, not the internals. Anyway, I risked Mom’s laptop. It detected the pen drive and even showed up the Explorer window with the pen drive’s contents! Then I tried clicking on something, and Explorer hung. Oops! Plucked out the thing and gave it another blow-drying. This time, it still showed up, but as I attempted to access the pen drive, Windows asked me if I wanted to format it. Not Good. SInce I didn’t have any really important data on it, I tried formatting it, but Windows said that the pen drive was write protected. What all can water-logging do!

Another round of drying, and then the pen drive was working just fine. Phew. By the way, the pen drive contained the result list for the preliminaries for the Junior Science Talent Search Examination or JSTSE. I qualified. You can find the result for the exam conducted on 31st Jan, 2008, here. Silly people, they typed it out, printed it, then scanned it, and conveniently forgot to OCR the scans.