So, just shy of five years after graduation, I’m back in a classroom.

This time, I’m taking an intermediate Japanese class from the local community college’s Continuing Education department. It was a little pricier than I expected for an 8-session class ($165), but it only has eight students in it so they’re probably not making a huge profit from us.

The first session was a good way to learn that I have forgotten how to write virtually every kanji I ever knew. So that was very educational, but it’s not the point of this post.

Rather, the experience I wanted to relay was as follows:

Part of the class material is an eBook, and the instructor asked me if I had a USB memory stick to copy it to. I shuffled around in my backpack a bit, found three of them, selected one and handed it to her.

…then I realized that her laptop screen was being mirrored to the projector, and furthermore that I had no idea what files were ON the memory stick in question.

I don’t make a habit out of carrying around anything particularly prurient, so I couldn’t tell you exactly what I was afraid of being shown off to the class, but there was definitely a moment of dread as she plugged it in. I may have, full disclosure here, gone just a LITTLE white. If I did, either nobody noticed or nobody said anything.

I can only assume that her computer achieved momentary sentience and empathy at the same time, because it thoughtfully did not open an explorer window with the contents of the disk. This confused the instructor long enough for me to offer to drive, at which point I right-clicked the eBook folder and did Send-To Removable Disk, followed by a hasty Eject once files were transferred.

On review: The memory stick in question appears to have been one I was using when I was messing around with .net programming by writing a simple comic book viewer. So, all that was on it was a bunch of issues of Global Frequency and The Flash, and a few episodes of Elementary, and it wouldn’t have been THAT mortifying to be outed as a nerd in front of the class. It could have been much worse. 🙂