Confession time

Many commentators took great pleasure in berating HM Government for losing hard drive after laptop after disk of confidential information. I pride myself on being one of those people. Once upon a time, that is.

Today I pride myself on being prematurely senile. Last Thursday, I sat down at a computer in the school library and wrote one-and-a-half parts of a G&P essay. I saved it on my USB pen drive. On Wednesday, I went to retrieve said USB pen drive from my pocket to help me with my Computing coursework and, to my horror, said USB pen drive wasn’t there!

Frantically I rifled around pocket after pocket after unbelievably stuffed pocket to find: nothing! Well nothing besides the millions of pieces of paper, thousands of pens, my stereotypically empty wallet, diary New Testament and the keys I had managed to leave in my door a couple of weeks ago, for an hour until my mother got home and, rather kindly, gave them back to me (and who says Twydall is a bad area?!). In short, the first of five places my USB pen drive could be was divide of anything useful. Typical!

It wasn’t in my bedroom. It wasn’t amongst the hundreds of unclaimed USB pen drives in the IT office. Either I’ve left it somewhere really stupid and someone has thought “this looks good, I’ll have this”, deleted all my stuff, changed the name and is now using it as his own; or I left it at Cadets. I’m hoping for the latter.

My problem is that I now stand a 10% chance of every seeing the pen drive again, 5% of anything actually remaining on there. To put it simply: the USB pen drive is now utterly useless to me, even if I do find out who stole it and is now claiming it is their own! So what is my only option from here? Buy a new one. Buy a better one. Buy one which hangs on the end of a keyring so that never again can I rifle around my pocket on the way home from school, listening to my iPod, hearing the keys jingling around, and fail to hear the sound of a 50g (at best), plastic USB pen drive hit the pavement (as could also have happened).

The main problem with losing my USB pen drive (apart from the coursework it contained) is that it stands as testament to a larger fact: my mind is slowly slipping away from me(!). I am 18 years-old and in the past few weeks I have almost lost a phone, my house, car and locker keys, a folder containing coursework (just half an hour ago), a pair of gloves and indeed anything else that Bruce would like to put on the conveyer belt; and have now lost my USB pen drive.

I am almost a genius – I have an IQ of over 130. I am now able to wrap my head around some of the most difficult theories in A-level Physics. I can program in Pascal, Delphi, HTML, PHP and SQL. I can understand the American electoral system (whilst Paul Clark supposedly can’t). Yet when it comes to remembering simple things like “hmm, I’ll just leave my gloves on the top of my locker whilst I sort things out at the end of the day”, I fail miserably and realise the next morning that they are still there!

Any suggestions of how to improve my memory would be most welcome (as long as they don’t include that stupid DS game)!