Only the strong data sticks survive

Ms. Alberta Pemberton, the unluckiest woman in the world, goes to the store to print a flyer.

Ms. Alberta Pemberton’s cat, Mitsy, was missing. It was her fourth one to go missing this month, the fifteenth of the year thus far. These others, Alberta was willing to let go; she simply chalked up their dissapearance to her famously poor luck. But Mitsy was different. Mitsy didn’t claw her shades, or deposit dead mice in Alberta’s sock drawer. Mitsy was a sweet kitty, and Alberta was determined to find her.

So she went to her computer and – after six unexpected crashes, four viruses finding their way onto her hard drive, and an unexpected four-hour power outage – she managed to design a decent-enough “Missing Cat” flyer. She saved it onto her Centon DataStick Sport 64GB Waterproof USB Drive, put on her sweater, and began walking (her bike tires appeared to have gone flat and her car had, overnight, become infested with hornets) to the office supply store that did color printing.

Along the way, the Centon managed to find its way through a hole in Ms. Pemberton’s pocket and all the way down her pant leg where it flew out, pushed forward by the upswing of her stride, and bounced along the sidewalk before stopping. Right where a large tree branch could fall on it. And another. But the Centon – with it's durable, shock-resistant silicon casing – was okay, and so Alberta picked it up and kept walking.

When she was still a half mile away, dark clouds gathered and it began pouring. Alberta had left her umbrella at home (whenever she tried to use it, she would be struck by lightning) and so she got absolutely soaked by the storm, as did the Centon, which had managed to find its way through a newly-formed hole in her other pocket and into a puddle. But being waterproof up to 1.8 meters, the Centon survived once again.

After that, things proceeded smoothly enough. Alberta only tripped a half-dozen times, encountered just five dangerous snakes, and was chased by only two dogs that had slipped their leads. At the store, her flyer managed to jam the printer just twice, and she was only delayed twenty minutes when a masked thug came in with a pistol and held up the print counter (he didn’t go to any of the cash registers for some reason).

But all-in-all, it was probably one of the easiest trips Alberta had taken in some time, and she walked home smiling, hanging the printer-mangled flyers on various telephone poles and trees along the way, all of which were then torn from the ground fifteen minutes later by an unexpected tornado that just happened to follow Ms. Alberta Pemberton’s exact route home.

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