My iPod won't let me do anything.

My iPod has been bugging out occasionally where the volume would get stuck increasing or decreasing and it would be stuck at either max or mute (which bothered me) so my solution was to turn it off and back on. Well that has always worked but recently when I turned it off and back on, it *_leaves me with an image of a USB pointing up to the iTunes icon_*. I assumed this meant I had to connect it to iTunes which I did, but it won't let me sync because I set a passcode on my ipod. Well I can't punch in the passcode because it locks me out with this image.

I can't sync it to my own computer at the moment, though, since I'm away from home. The bold underlined part is the problem. I've tried the 10 second home button + power restart to no avail.