Was digging through my drawer of assorted USB drives recently and stumbled across this thing.

Small plastic bear for scale.

If you bought a 2010 MacBook Air, which didn’t come with an optical drive, you got this in case you needed to reinstall the operating system.  Of course, they couldn’t give you just ANY pedestrian-looking USB thumb drive, so it’s tiny and slim and doesn’t have any ugly protective metal shield on the connectors.

I’ve never owned an Air, mind you.  I have this because, in 2010, I was working for my local university, and there was a professor who had a 2008 MBA and really wanted an upgrade.  As occasionally happens in these instances, they accidentally left their laptop on top of their car and then ran it over while backing out of their garage.

No, I’m not sure how you have something fall off your car while backing up and THEN run over it, especially in a way that would leave a perfectly-centered and flawlessly-parallel tread mark along the length of the computer.

It was not, however, my place to point this out to them.  My job was to take in the shards of what had once been a computer and issue them a new laptop.

Anyway, when I was setting up their new Mac, I asked them if they wanted the recovery key and they vaguely waved it away, which I took as justification to keep the thing.  I had to find a dodgy Chinese utility to unlock it and make it writable, but it’s a perfectly usable 8 GB thumb drive with a little story behind it.

Presumably, the computer it belonged to was dropped accidentally fell into a bathtub as soon as a newer model came out, but by then I was no longer working for the university.