I consider myself somewhat technologically advanced: at least I?m the only one in my family who when invited for supper or a family gathering is asked to look at the inner workings of a computer. While the hostess is in the kitchen shredding lettuce and the host is grilling hamburgers, I relegate myself safely tucked in a back bedroom working on ?the machine that is not running just right.?

So, I ask myself, what took me so long to fall in love with a thumb drive?

I guess it was just one of those things I didn?t have time for, didn?t quite understand, didn?t quite appreciate, and more importantly, it wasn?t thrust into my hands.
I wasn?t turned onto the thumb drive until I was ?asked? by my husband to ?help? with the Cross Country meet that ?he? was putting on at the high school where he coaches. For years, he has tabulated the results by hand and my assistance was delegated to the hospitality room.

But enter a new assistant t coach who also taught computers who said she would handle tabulating the results and to please find someone else to do the hospitality room because she would need his wife and her laptop. Knowing we didn?t have wireless access I wondered how we would get everything onto one machine in a timely manner. I didn?t ask and didn?t offer to tell her that I didn?t have a burner on my laptop. She told me she couldn?t find her thumb drive and ordered me to get her one for the athletic department.

Gulp! How did I tell her, a woman who shared an interest in computers (very rare) that I was a fake, a fraud? She thought I knew a thing or two about computers. How could I tell her that I had never operated a thumb drive except when I helped our music teacher put on a ginormous music program which had 500 gazillion pictures of every child in Kindergarten through Fifth grade at two schools in our district? My role that evening was sticking her thumb drive in the machine and opening up the Power Point presentation and clicking to the next slide with each wave of her hand.

So, I did what any wanna-be geek does: I bought one, stuck it in my laptop and started to play with it. The thumb drive, or as it says on mine, USB Drive blinks a beautiful blue when inserted into my laptop. It reminds me that it is always thinking, always working.

It worked like a charm as we transferred my files of who finished a blazing 12:11 through those who DNF (did not finish). As coaches circled around like buzzards waiting for results, I proudly pulled out the thumb drive, which moments before had happily winked blue at me, and then went to his new machine and started blinking blue for it?s new owner ? like a puppy who just lives to love, to please his owner.

After the cross country meet, I began to explore the possibilities of owning a USB drive. Working from home, I have four machines at my disposal. I have different reasons for switching on a whim, and when traveling for work, I need files at a moment?s notice. The old tact of emailing files to another computer, turning it on and downloading it onto that machine are over. Now, I plug in my little thumb drive, it begins to wink at me and I wink back and feed it.

On my most loved computer board, Geeks To Go (the Purse Forum runs a distant second ? one needs a stylish bag for my Dell Inspiron 700m laptop), one of the members puts a thumb drive on his keychain and downloads all the programs he needs to fix computers of friends and family who invite him to dinner.

I?ve already started browsing The Purse Forum for the right key case that will complement the sleek black of the USB drive which will make the blue pop when pulled out of the case. I wonder if the Chanel I have had my eye on will work in black lambskin?..hmmmm.