It was a quiet evening in the bucolic foothills of academia. I had just finished updating my lecture for the following morning – checking that the various theories expounded hadn’t been discredited since last term, and that the embedded web links didn’t redirect to sites of a pornographic nature – and uploaded the file to my university’s shiny new content management system.

One last job to do before bed: make a local copy of the file – just in case. So I pulled out my wallet, where I keep the USB data stick that is my constant companion. The impression left in the leather by the lump of memory was visible, but the chip itself was missing. A cold, bowel-loosening sense of loss edged down my spine. For the next hour, I searched every pocket, wallet, floor, drawer and fruit bowl with increasing desperation – before sinking into a chair for a large whisky and some serious thought.

Backtracking over my day, I concluded that I’d last seen the memory stick in the lecture theatre that afternoon. I remembered plugging it in. Surely I’d removed it at the end of the session? Nope. Running the memory frame by frame, I recalled glumly that as I had gone to do so, a student had come up and asked a question about assessment – then, as I was scraping up my paperwork, the next lecturer had started making gestures from outside the door, so I’d panicked and fled. Leaving the USB stick still in the console. Damn.

Maybe, just maybe, it was still there – calmly waiting, with dog-like devotion, for its luckless owner to return. I checked the time and realised that the building would now be locked and the alarms set. My hope lay in an early start, getting into the lecture theatre before the first timetabled session. I finished the whisky, rejected the thought of another with deep regret, and went to bed.

In the dark, the demons came. As I stared sleeplessly at the ceiling, I became increasingly anxious as I asked myself what files could be on the memory stick. At first, I stuck with the story that I wanted to believe: that I only ever kept copies of my lecture slides on it. That was why I carried the thing, after all.

Slowly, the painful realisation came that – over time – other stuff might have crept on to it almost by osmosis. First, there were the holiday photos I’d taken to get printed. Nothing too salacious there: only a bit of light drinking and some tasteful landscapes. Hang on a moment, though – what about the late-night pics of the senior common room Christmas party? Surely I’m not that stupid? I vaguely remembered that folk had asked me for prints – but what if someone found those photos on the stick and circulated them around the campus? I concluded that I’d be a dead man if that happened.