Crappy Cruzer

Oh, yeah, I just had to be soooo ambitious. After about a year of enjoying flawless performance from a couple of cheapo USB drives I got free at trade shows, I had to go out and a "really good one": A Sandisk Cruzer Titanium 512MB. Its a great product. Just ask us. A 9.0 CNET Rating. Amazing. Makes an iPod look like something from a flea market. Too bad it doesn't work. Dead. After a mere 6 weeks of use. And I babied the damned thing, carrying it in its own little compartment in my briefcase, never dropping it. And for that it rewards me with a "USB Device Not Recognized" error when I pop it into any XP machine. A call to Sandisk tech support lead to the almost instant issuance of an RMA #, which I would normally laud as fabulous customer service except I suspect it means they get a lot of these returned and its just a well-oiled reaction. They had no ideas how to get the OS to recognize it even one more time so I could rescue my files. So they want me to return it -- with my files trapped on it. Uhhmmmm, no. Those files are business documents and I don't need to be wondering if some clever geek at Sandisk knows how to resurrect dead Cruzers, thereby unlocking my mundane but nonetheless private documents and plans for the next few months of my official duties at Editor at Large. Not worth it. So the thing will remain buried in my desk drawer forever, a silent reminder to myself to never again trust a USB drive as primary storage -- and to attend more trade shows so I can stock up on those freebie USB drives, the good ones. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have about a megabyte of Word docs to recreate from memory.