> My USB thumb drive accidentally got put in the washing machine tonight. I had left it in my pocket.
>
> Luckily, though, these things are hardy beasts. It survived with apparently no damage whatsoever to either the casing or the data. I did run it through CHKDSK just to make sure, and the only things to come out were 3 lost chains in 3 lost files; 2 of which I can account for, and the other one isn't a problem anyway (and I'm fairly sure it wouldn't have been caused by the washing machine; if there had been any damage to the data at all from that, it would have been far more devastating than one lost chain).
>
> I'd read tales about these USB thumb drives surviving things like that in the past, and now I'm thankful they're true. ;) And now the casing is clean and smells nice. Bonus!

I discovered, to my satisfaction, that an USB memory stick "formatted" on Linux (with the dd command) can be read by Microsoft Windows without any special configuration whatsoever. This is an easy way to transfer data between computers that don't have a network connection. It's good to know the sticks are so durable. Back in the 1990s I used to work with floppies but they tended to degrade just from being there.