Annoyance

I brought one of my flash drives to work today, so I could work on the mess-in-progress (mip) on my lunch hour. I often intend to work on the mip at work; most of the time, that's as far as it gets. But today...today I actually worked on it. Yay me. When I was done and I'd saved everything, I disconnected the drive and tossed it into my purse. Or at least I remembered doing it.

So imagine how irritated I was when I couldn't find it. I have a couple of pockets inside my purse--I think they're intended for cell phones but I use one for pens, my bus tickets and my work ID and the other for lipstick and lip gloss. The flash drive I used has a clip on the cap, like the one on a pen cap, so I usually clip the drive to the side of one of the pockets. Not today. I was in a hurry, my mind already somewhere else.

When I couldn't find the drive, all I could think was that I'd only imagined tossing the drive into my purse. I was about to do it, picturing it drop into my open purse, but then I got distracted and didn't actually toss it in. I've done that before: confused my imagined action with a real one. Apparently that had happened this time.

That, or I'd missed the purse's giant maw and the flash drive was sitting in the bottom of my desk drawer. I hadn't heard the plastic plink on the drawer's metal bottom because it had landed on the paper bag covering the bottom. Yeah, yeah, that might be it...and if that was the case, at least the drive wasn't sitting out in plain sight on my desktop, even if it out of reach until Monday

Still, in one last burst of hope and desperation, I decided to check my purse more thoroughly than before. I pulled the pens and ID and tickets and lipsticks and lip gloss out of the inside pocket, thinking maybe the flash drive had slipped to the bottom of one of them.

No go.

Next, I decided to empty the rest of my purse of all the things that seem necessary for daily life--two eyeglass cases, daily planner, mp3 player, a tube of hand lotion, the case holding my three fountain pens--just to make sure the flash wasn't hiding. Because they do that.

As this one did tonight. To my relief, I found the drive deep in a corner, trying to escape notice behind a fold of fabric and a small pill case full of Excedrin. I could have worked this weekend without the stuff I did today, but I didn't want to. And now I don't have to.