Mounting question

[Tom Masterson]

I have a mount problem.  I have several usb sticks and a usb external hard 
drive and am using Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick.  When I mount any of them using 
either mount or pmount or allowing them to automount I can't copy anything 
to them from the console except as root (sudo to be exact).  Also things 
like vmware or virtualbox do not have access to them.  The command I use 
is:

sudo mount -t <type> -o rw,umask=000 <device> <dir>

Substituting appropriate types and device and directory.  Regardless of 
what I have tried the directory always comes up with permissions of 
rwxr-xr-x with owner root:root so that only root can write to the drive.

How do I solve this so that I as a user can write to the drive from the 
command line?

Tom