Ok yeah…it was absolutely my fault for forgetting it in the library, but how can you, as a college student who lives and dies by your own flash drive, steal someone elses?
Do you know what you just did to me? I mean…you do know finals week is NEXT WEEK. So since you don’t know what you did to me I will inform you what I now have to do this week.
A 80 page, 150 source literature review. You didn’t steal all my sources on this one, but about 25% of them. Although you did steal about 50 of the pages I had written
A 20 page report.
A 30 page thesis proposal. Yes, you stole ALL of my sources on this one. Every. Single. One. I now have to start 100% from scratch.
I hope you enjoy your new 2GB flash drive while I turn in shitty papers and lose what will probably be a letter grade.
Sorry about that, dude, but why did you store it only on your Flash drive? Most people use that for back-up. Next time, make sure your flash drive is infected with a nasty virus!
another good story to tell on why you should always have a backup, or better yet, just write your first drafts in google docs, then transfer and edit them appropriately for the final draft.
Wow, that sucks, especially so close to the end of the semester.
But dude, as others have noted, your biggest mistake wasn’t forgetting the drive in the library; it was having such important material ONLY on a USB drive. For stuff this crucial, you really have to make sure that you have copies in multiple places, including online. Whether you use an online document application like Google Docs, a backup service like SugarSync or DropBox, or even just email the important documents to yourself, you can’t just have one copy.
At the university where i teach, faculty and students all get access to online storage provided by the university. I’m not sure how much the students get, but as a faculty member i get 10GB. This is set up so that it is part of your desktop whenever you log in to a public computer on campus.
When i log into a library computer using my campus ID and password, the My Documents folder on the desktop takes me straight to my network storage space. I can create documents, download articles, and do all sorts of other work in the library, saving everything to my network space, and then get access to those documents from my home computer, or any other computer. I even have a synchronization tool set up that allows me to sync my network folders to my home computer, and i run the sync every time i do any important work.
My university is an underfunded state school, so i’d be surprised if it were the only university offering such a service. You should see if your own institution has something similar.
I’ll quote you, but think of it as me quoting everyone:
I forgot to type it but I was lumping the “only keeping it on my flash drive” along with losing it in the first place. I am mad at the person and this week is gonna be re-goddamn-diculous, but I very much know it was my fault to begin with.
Yes I’ve checked the lost and found multiple times. If a library worker finds it they open the doc up and just e-mail you…which I never got…and they also store them…which they didn’t have.
We do have access to dropbox but I simply never used it. (Used in past tense now)
Luckily, I got sick of losing flash drives in high school and started keeping them on a lanyard with my keys. (It didn’t always work. I remember a couple of times racing back to the library to find a computer with a big green lanyard sticking out of it. But at least it made it less likely someone could just pocket it and walk away.)
Yep, flash drives, the tiny pocketable way to loose your data without really trying.:rolleyes:
I’m feeling your pain, I’m waaaaay out of college, but had a bag stolen at the airport. In that bag, a flash drive with the only COMPLETE copies of 10 Corporate Management training courses i had developed over a 3 year period. Each course consisted of a Trainer’s Guide, a Participant Workbook, a PowerPoint, and numerous worksheets and handouts.
I’ve never lost a flash drive, but I once had a laptop crash during the last week of a very labor intensive class, taking my work along with it. Unfortunately it was unsalvageable. I also had to listen to well meaning people telling me that I should have backed my data up by using a flash drive. I had to start over again and it was a very shitty week. I knew it was dumb and everybody was right, which made me even more frustrated.
After that I did use a flash drive (thank God) which was a good thing because the replacement laptop died six weeks later, in the middle of two labor intensive classes.
Related rant: WTF is with flashdrives where the lanyard attachment is on the cap? I mean that’s awesome, I arrived with the cap intact but the flash drive and it’s contents are long gone. Crazyness!
The crazy thing is that I heard about two similar thefts on my campus in the past week or so, but nothing earlier in the semester. What is is about flash drive and backpack thieves that compels them to wait until the thick of crunch time to do their stealing?
Super painful - spry to hear it. But, in all fairness, probably a better lesson to learn at school than at work. Losing a letter grade beats losing a job, promotion, bonus, whatever…
