The Flash Drive Hostage Crisis

One of the most difficult challenges to occur in recent technological history occurred one Monday afternoon, where software engineer Dave found himself struggling to unplug his usual USB flash drive from his laptop.

Dave was very knowledgeable regarding complex networking protocols, yet he found himself locked in an agonizing battle with a pop-up screen stating that the USB flash drive could not be safely ejected as it was currently "in use by another program". No other information was offered by the operating system.

Attempting to solve this dilemma in any possible way, Dave shut down all applications currently working on his PC, logged out of his web browser, and stopped his email client too. But still, when trying to eject the drive, he was faced with the same message saying that Dave was apparently unfit to be classified as a human being. The poor guy simply did not know what else to do in front of such a sophisticated piece of hardware, except for one thing – either to lose the data on the flash drive or make it permanent.