Imagine my horror when my other half found my 8Gb USB Memory Stick this morning - in the washing machine. The machine had been on early in the morning doing a 60 degree spin cycle on the whites and the stick had been in a shirt pocket. This stick contains everything, my whole life, my pictures, my documents, my essential music, programs, blog backup … everything!

I was without it all day yesterday and have been racking my brain trying to remember where I put it - fortunately I do a weekly backup so at best I would have only lost a few days work on it - but I hated being without it and was fearful that I might have dropped it somewhere.

But the best bit - it still works! The little red light lit up when I hesitantly pushed it into the USB slot on my home PC then XP jumped in and asked me what I’d like to do with it. I loaded in a few files and hey presto - a nice clean USB memory stick. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this sort of extreme cleaning but it does make me wonder just exactly how much abuse it could take. I think I’ll leave that for someone else to find out!