Incredible luck finding something you lost

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Many years ago, when I had my first car, I once added some oil and apparently didn’t screw the oil cap back on the engine block properly. The next day I looked under the hood and the cap was missing. Crap, now I have to go to an auto parts store and buy a new one. I went for a bike ride and four or five blocks from my house, I saw an oil cap lying in the gutter. Wow, I wonder if it will fit my car? I grabbed it and rode back home. I discovered that not only did it fit my car, it was the same cap that I had lost.

Any other improbable stories of finding lost items?

2

I’ve got a good one. Years ago, my Wife lost her cell phone in our drive way. This was before we just left them on all the time. Couldn’t call it and listen for a ring.

We deduced that it probably fell from her when she parked in our driveway. But, I had plowed the drive since she had lost it. The plow truck pushed the cell phone into a pile-o-snow.

We really didn’t know. But after ten minutes of digging, I found it in perfect shape.

3

I was clearing trail on my dirt bike a couple years ago and left my cell phone pocket open. We had to bust through some snowbanks and I discovered it was gone when we got back to the truck right before dark. Went back the next day and saw a corner of the phone sticking out of a snowbank–still worked!

4

My wedding ring was too large to fit my finger. I married at 22 and I was a skinny thing but I thought I’d fill out someday, so I bought a size too large. Well…I did eventually gain some weight, but the ring was still too big. It fell off several times. Mostly when I could see what was happening, luckily. Except once–

My car was a 1987 Dodge Omni hatchback at the time (I know, I know). One day about three months after I lost the ring I had occasion to raise the hatch after about…oh, three months of having it consistently in the lowered position. I got it upright and there was the ring below it. It had apparently slid off when I’d lowered it the previous time. Not bad!

5

Ages ago, I used to get off work on Friday and take my paycheck to the local grocery store to cash it. One time, I arrived at the store and saw my check had disappeared from the passenger seat of my old VW. I looked everywhere and couldn’t find it. I went back to work and was told the best they could do was stop payment on it Monday and write me a new check less the stop payment fee. So, I drove back towards the store, searching the roadside. There it was, laying out in someone’s yard. It had slipped out of the car underneath the passenger side door. I had removed the rusted-out heat channels and hadn’t put in the new ones yet. I did say it was an old VW…

6

I was walking with my wife in a drizzling rain near our house, on a sidewalk running next to the commuter rail tracks. The tracks are below grade, probably 10-15 feet below the sidewalk, separated by an 8ft tall chain link fence. A gust of wind took my hat off my head and blew it over the fence and into the rail corridor. We quickly lost sight of it, so even if we wanted to somehow jump the fence we didn’t know where to look.

Two months later we were walking the same route and we saw the RR people clearing the right of way with a brush hog. When I looked at where they were about to clear I saw my missing hat!! A worker was walking ahead of the brush hog checking for hazards and I managed to flag him down. That was tough because he was wearing ear protection and wasn’t looking up much. I pointed out the hat to him and he found a long branch and handed it back to me.

7

Oh, the wedding ring story reminds me of another one. A friend and I were at a concert in a medium sized club. He went to the bathroom and returned, and some time later he noticed his wedding ring was not on his finger. He suspected that when he was washing his hands, the ring came off when he was drying them with a paper towel. This seemed somewhat unlikely to me, but he decided to go into the bathroom, take the bag of trash out of the garbage can and bring it home to search it. I figured this disgusting task was going to be fruitless, but sure enough, he found his ring in there the next day.

8

At a previous job I drove to and from work on a very busy highway. I had changed into a brand new pair of running shoes to take a run or a hike after work in a place near work, and when I changed back out of my running shoes I placed them temporarily, and then promptly forgot them, on top of my Jeep.

So I’m driving home on the busy highway and I happen to glance in my rear view mirror and see a shoe fly off onto the highway. I immediately curse myself for putting anything “temporarily” on the roof of the Jeep.

I get home and see one lone shoe, wedged against the roof rack, which somehow managed to not fly off on a 30 mile drive at 70mph. It’s Friday, so all that weekend I think “maybe the shoe landed in the breakdown lane and will be recoverable…?” Again, brand new pair of shoes I really liked. It was a summer weekend, with no rain.

The following Monday on the way home I’m eagle-eyeing the breakdown lane all the way. And then…I see it. The shoe, sole-down, looking perfect, like it was on display at the shoe store.

So I pull over, into the breakdown lane, put on my flashers. The shoe had landed on the breakdown lane of an overpass, which was kinda scary to walk on- on one side, a small guardrail and a big drop onto a highway below. On the other side, semi trucks are blowing past me and kicking up uncomfortable amounts of wind and debris. But I soldier on until I get to the shoe, which looks pristine. Victory!

On the way back to my Jeep, I see a couple has pulled over just behind where I am parked. They walk toward me with concern— “are you ok? Do you need any help?” I didn’t feel like getting into the whole story, so I just said, “nah, I’m good thanks, just lost a shoe” holding up the recovered prize. They looked at me like I was nuts. On the drive home I realized they must have thought I meant the shoe I was wearing and wondered how you lose a shoe driving on the freeway.

Sadly though, when I tried my recovered shoe on, I discover a hard plastic shell part around the heel became permanently deformed from apparently at least one car tire running over it, which made it unwearable. I tried to form it back into shape, but it was never the same.

9

The best way to find something you have been unable to find for some time is to go and buy a replacement.
Normally the original will turn up within 24 hours.

10

Two stories, both while travelling to Chicago from Minnesota:

  1. When we were in college, my sister and I were visiting my other sister on a spur-of-the-moment trip to Chicago, back when we were poor and naïve. We decided to swap drivers on a remote exit on I-90 in Minnesota, but as soon as we were back on the road, that $10 bill that we were going to need for gas (did I mention this was in the 1970’s?) was missing from the center console. The only thing I could think of was it blew out of the car at that exit, so after a few miles we took the next exit and back-tracked. My sister said there’d be no way we would find it again, but there at the top of the ramp, next to the stop sign, was the money.

  2. My wife and I were making another trip, again to visit my sister in Schaumburg, driving down the I-90 tollway which had lots of construction going on. We decided to stop for lunch at one of the Illinois “oases” that included a McDonalds. Before we started out again, my wife wanted to get something out of the trunk and put her white cloth purse on the roof of the car. Of course, she left it there when we drove away, and remembered it just a mile down the road. We decided to backtrack (again!), but because it was a toll road we had to pay multiple tolls to get off and get back on again. We stopped at the same exit, when my wife thought it would be impossible to find it again: the reason? Her purse was a white cloth sack that looked just like the sandbags holding down the construction cones that lined the ramp. We walked maybe 20 feet down the ramp when one of the sandbags looked slightly different - it was her purse!

11

I also have wedding ring that’s a bit too large (it was an heirloom and difficult to resize). I wear it on my middle finger so it fits, but one winter I was visiting a friend and parked in the street near his place. When I left it had been snowing, so I needed to brush snow off the car. Not a lot, and it wasn’t too cold, so I didn’t bother with the snow brush and just used my bare hands. Halfway through I felt the ring slip off my finger (shrunk a bit in the cold and was wet) and disappear into the snow. I spent a good ten minutes searching fruitlessly for it, before giving it up for lost, and driving home to confess to my wife that I had lost her father’s ring.

Three weeks later, I was visiting the friend again, parked on the street again, got out, just happened to look down and see a glint of gold in the packed snow. Dug it out and it was my ring.

12

I found a book at a market once that I’d had as a kid. My copy had a 1984 Christmas postage stamp stuck inside the back cover so I opened the back cover of this book. Lo and behold - there was the stamp.

I hadn’t lost the book so much as given it away, but it was cool to encounter it again. And no, I didn’t buy it back. It wasn’t a very good book.

13

  1. I will start with another wedding ring story. One day, after I had been putting the garden to bed for the winter I realized my wedding ring was missing. I had lost a fair amount of weight recently. I didn’t make the connection with the garden work until the following spring, when I was digging around and, sure enough, the ring appeared.

  2. We were spending a year in Switzerland and bought a car for European delivery. We were going by boat to London and I arranged to have it delivered there. After visiting friends for a few days, we put all our luggage for the year in the car and on the roof secured–I thought–be a couple of bungee cords. We drove to the ferry and then through the French countryside. At some point I realized that one of the suitcases had flown off the roof. I turned around and drove back and about 20 km down the road we discovered it very visible on top of a hill. How had it gotten there? Well a farmer had been out plowing his field (it was around May 1), seen the suitcase fly and rescued it from the road and put it on top of the hill to make it more visible. I guess I gave him a nice gift.

  3. A year later, we left Switzerland to spend a summer in Denmark and, as we left, I filled the gas tank and, after paying, drove off. About 20 km later someone came up on the left lane of the highway and signaled strongly I should pull over. I didn’t understand but I did it. He was the gas jockey and had forgotten to put back the cap. When he realized it, he had driven 20 km to catch up with me and give it back! I was too stunned to do anything, but I should have given him a nice tip.

14

Another gas cap story. We were on vacation in our RV and stopped in Tok Junction, Alaska to gas up the thing before heading north to Paxson, which is about 180 miles. I pulled into Paxson about three hours later, drove up to the gas pump, got out, and realized that my gas cap was sitting on top of the pump back in Tok. I stood there cursing myself for a bit, as there was no way we were going to drive across the Old Denali Highway (a sea of potholes, rock, etc) and not have a big problem with gas sloshing out. I happened to glance at the top of the pump I was parked next to, and there lay a gas gap. I thought “there’s no way that can fit my vehicle”, but gave it a try anyway, and whaddya know!

Thinking about it now, I suspect that most gas caps might fit in a lot of vehicles, as the openings are pretty standard, but back then it seemed like a minor miracle.

15

I was a kid and had one of those zippered CD cases that held all my CDs. It was lime green with white flower shapes- not exactly easily camouflaged.
That thing was missing for months. I looked EVERYWHERE. Tore my bedroom apart, looked in every drawer, every bag… it seemed like it must have just vanished.

Well, I was a Catholic kid. So if I mentioned it to anybody, their solution was “say a prayer to St. Anthony.”

So, finally, I did. But instead of a straightforward prayer, I did a little ritual I’d been taught: you stand in the middle of a room and just spin around while saying “Tony, Tony, turn around- something’s lost and must be found.” and thinking of the lost thing. I didn’t really have any expectations, but figured… what the hell. Can’t hurt.

That little green bastard was RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME when I stopped. Practically at the end of my finger. Sitting on the arm of a chair, where I can only assume it had been the whole time. I know better than to sincerely attribute it to divine intervention, but it was weird.

16

So what is it about wedding rings? They once were lost, but now are found…

17

That’s the story of my life. Purchasing a replacement was/is/will likely be the only truly reliable way of “finding” lost items. With me though, sometimes the original is unearthed in a day or two. Occasionally more. Sometimes 30 minutes. :roll_eyes:

18

I have two lost & found ring stories, both within the past year.

I wear two rings; my wedding ring on my right hand (I’m widowed) and a “friendship ring” (for lack of a better term - it was a gift from a friend I met after my wife died) which I wear on my left hand. I’ve lost weight in the past few years, and as a result both rings occasionally get loose and if I’m not careful they will slip off. Last year, on two separate occasions, each of them managed to go missing while I was on convention trips, and I figured they were gone forever I did ask each of the hotels where I had been staying to let me know if they showed up in the lost and found.

Then when I was packing for another trip I found my wedding ring in my suitcase. I can only figure that it must have slipped off while I was packing while on my previous trip.

Then last month I got a call from a friend I had spent a few days with after a convention early last year. I had asked her to keep an eye out for it in case it was somewhere in her car or house. She had found my other ring near her cats’ litter box. I can only figure that it must have slipped off in my sleep, and one of her cats had been using it as a cat toy.

19

I’d gone shopping and on the way in, retrieved my mail and threw it into the paper bag of groceries. Set the bag down and a bit later, emptied it and realized a very important letter (which I had glanced at not an hour ago) was missing. I retraced my steps to the mailbox, searched the car, searched the garage, searched the lawn and the street. … turns out the paper bag was double-bagged. the Very Important Letter had slid down in the gap. (I could have disposed of the bags and the letter, never knowing what had happened to it)

20

To be double sure, make sure to discard the receipt from the replacement.