yes, hot tea is not a good drink for computers. Cold water is bad enough. Unfortunately the actuall circuit board is cracked, meaning there's no connection able to be made. Local firm couldn't cobble it together... so it's in the post for the clever people in Bury [not sure if that's Bury, Yorkshire or Bury St Edmonds, Suffolk] to make like Abbie Schuto in NCIS [and don't I wish she was real and was a friend of mine].
I've had the casing bitten off before now, and used a mix of superglue and duct-tape; I've had one fall apart [duct-tape] and I've had one less drastically bent, so I could get it to connect so long as I jammed it in hard and then held it in with blutac. I'm getting sick of flashdrives, they may be idiot proof but they are NOT cat-proof. I've ordered a small external hard drive for twenty quid, 120gb which face it is less than 4x the cost of a 32gb flash drive. And I can attach it with - you guessed - duct-tape.
I hope your lap and surroundings were not too badly scalded. Those are seriously bad regions to have blisters.
