A few years ago I got a new universal serial bus or USB from my beloved. It was my first. I have used it ever since to carry my files on my trips to Zagreb, where I used her computer. Over the years, I stuffed it with all sorts of files. Some of the files I used only in Zagreb, and I often forgot to copy them onto any of my computers in Motovun when I returned home. A while back I bought another and smaller USB of much greater capacity, but the old one remained my main bridge to my beloved’s computer in the Croatian capital. A day before my last trip back to Istria it conked out, though. My beloved’s computer could not recognize it any longer. Neither she nor I did anything that could explain the sudden change. I took the USB with me to see whether my computers at home could recognize it. As I just learned, they could not. I tried every trick I knew, but without any success. Perplexed, I tried to remember how much was lost. Not much, as it turns out, but the mysterious loss still hurts. The USB is in the garbage bin by now. And I am even more annoyed with modern technology than I have ever been. There is something deeply unsettling about things that one does not and cannot possibly understand without extensive and indisputably excessive training.