Michael, my seven-year-old, has seen too many movies where portable drives and disks are crucial to some dastardly scheme. For months, he’s been finding my old ones around, engineering ways to hide them or covertly wear them on his person, and demanding that I make them DO whatever magical thing they do. He’s convinced I’m hiding something.

I tell him they’re just boxes for stuff. That the box is useful only for transporting things that he neither has nor needs. But he continues to hoard them in great secrecy and plug them in to anything they fit, expecting…I don’t know what. The last one was empty except for an Invisible Man essay test and the multiple-choice answer key to goodness-knows-what. Maybe he thinks the nuclear code is ACAEEBACEB.