can sneak up on your floppies indirectly, in stages. You start with
clean hands. Then, however, they fall domino style when you touch a
dirty table or one with your office mate’s submarine-sandwich
drippings. You return to your own desk briefly before you yourself
leave for lunch. You don’t work with floppies then, and you wash your
hands after eating, but during your brief stop at your desk before
lunch, you’ve already left a trace of grease behind, anyway. Your disk
box picks it up when you set it on the wrong spot on the desk. Then,
working with the floppies, you lay one atop the box. Now the disk
itself fails. Alas, most disk failures aren’t gradual like a recording
that gets progressively noisier until you can’t stand to listen to it
anymore—they tend to be sudden and total.