Yesterday afternoon was a whirlwind of meetings. From 1pm until 5pm I was booked solid in four different meetings. I was going from room to room and building to building at Microsoft. Usually this isn’t a problem, but yesterday was a big day. It was the day that the system requirements, which I am responsible for were to be sent out to be signed off by the business. And when I say “by the business”, I mean that 25 people have to all say “yup looks good to me!” Somehow in the moving from room to room I had removed my USB key from my pocket and left it somewhere in building 40. I didn’t realize that I was missing it at the time.
Fast forward to this morning and I’m in the process of gathering the items from my “pile” of stuff that I use everyday. Wallet, check. Phone, check. Keys, check. Chapstick, check. USB Key, uh…. where that thing?
After I have the items from my pile the next part of my morning routine is to check the traffic and my e-mail on my phone when I am leaving for work. When I checked my e-mail I noticed a mail from Trevor, who is also working out at Microsoft on a different project, asking if I was missing my USB key. Holy Crap! Yes! I quickly replied in my car (I was parked in my driveway) and sent it off. But, minutes later I realized I had only sent my response to Trevor and not the rest of the folks on the thread. Doh!
Once I arrived at my desk, I cracked open Outlook and read the thread. It’s actually pretty amazing how this got linked back to me.
A very nice man finds my USB key in one of the two conference rooms I was in yesterday in Building 40. He e-mails somebody he knows to ask her if it is hers. He asks her because he saw a folder on the root of my USB key that is jamiey.net. Her name was Jamie Yu… jamiey. Go figure, she happened to be missing a USB key as well. Since it wasn’t hers, she decided to visit jamiey.net to see if she could get any info about who it might be. She finds out that Trevor’s name is listed as a friend on her site and she looks him up in the GAL. Next, Trevor is brought into the thread. It’s not his USB key, but Trevor includes me since he knows I spend quite a bit of time on that side of campus. Now I enter the thread and see that my missing USB key was found. Sweet!
When I couldn’t find it this morning I figured that I had thrown it in my bag and that I’d look for it when I got to work. Needless to say, this was a awesome surprise when I checked my mail this morning. After loosing my digital camera on the plane back from my brother’s wedding, you wonder if people return things that are found. This was a huge thing to me to have this returned to me. Not only is there highly confidential information on this USB key, but somebody thought to take the time to seek out it’s owner. That’s the part that really impresses me. Needless to say I am extremely thankful and now there’s a “HELP_IM_LOST.txt” file on the root of my USB key now.