Bending Your Thumb

I was given Carol's sister's old 2002-era Dell laptop recently, in hopes of degunking it and making it useful in Carol's hobby room for Web lookups. My approach in dealing with the machine was what I generally do: Leave it off-network, and plug in a USB thumb drive full of portable degunking utilities. Being in a hurry rarely leads to anything good, and what I was not used to was a laptop in which the USB ports are on the spine of the machine rather than one side or another. So I plugged it into the back, and at some time during my first ninety seconds in front of the laptop, I tipped it back and up on its spine to see if the battery lock had come loose on the bottom plate. The obvious result is shown above.

Dratz. Cruzer Minis are getting increasingly uncommon, and this was literally the first time that I have ever had one go bad on me, whether I was the proximal cause of badness or not. Astonishingly, the drive still works, though the metal USB connector is now holding on solely by its printed circuit contacts. Fortunately, there was nothing on the drive but software that I have elsewhere, so it went into the trash without huge regrets. Not huge. Not small. Middling.