The Silicon Jungle by David H. Rothman

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.