Yesterday I was working late, and didn’t get away from the office until after 10.30. I took the train home from Waterloo as usual, dozing a bit en route, and got off just before 12.30am at the small country station a few miles from my house.
As I walked blearily over the footbridge over the railway, I looked over at the car park. “That’s odd,” I thought. “My car’s not in the usual spot.” I mentally rewound to the morning to try and remember where I parked.
:smack:
That’s right, I’d got stuck in traffic, realised I was going to miss my train (they’re only twice an hour from that station) and driven to the main station about a dozen miles closer to London to catch the fast train. The station that I’d passed through more half an hour ago. The station to which there were now no more trains until 6 o’clock the next morning. Oops.
To make matters worse, my mobile phone had chirped its last low-battery squawk during the train journey, so I now had to walk the best part of two miles to the nearest phone box (I told you it was a country station), still five miles from home. Fortunately I have a very understanding girlfriend who was far more polite than I would have been had I been dragged out of bed shortly after 1am to come and collect their idiot other half.
Heh. When I was further away from thirty than you are, I went out to lunch with co-workers. We were going to take my car. But we couldn’t find it in the lot. I went to the security desk and let them know, and they promised to drive around the lot and look for it.
We went to lunch in a co-worker’s car. Halfway through the meal, I remembered. I had carpooled to work that day. My car was in a park-and-ride lot 15 miles away.
:smack: :smack: :smack:
In my own defense, I was rather hoping the car had been stolen - it was ancient and quite unreliable and we’d have been better off with the insurance money than with having to try to sell it ourselves. But evidently the car thieves are smarter than that.
This happens to me all the time. I’m 36, and I’ve really believed that my car had been stoloen on at least 30 occasions. I was wrong 29 times. The one time it actually was stolen, I didn’t call the cops for an hour because I just assumed that I must have parked somewhere else.
A few years ago I heard on the news in the UK that a woman got a call from the cops to say her car had been reported by the security guards at a hospital parking lot.
It was the hospital where she worked, and it was reported to the cops had been sitting there ever since the day she’d absent-mindedly forgotten where she’d left it, reported it stolen, and had it replaced on insurance - two years previously.
I’ve always said it’s a good thing I don’t have a baby. I would wander off and leave it somewhere and only hours later think, “Well, where did I put that thing? Have to just wait until it cries.”
A good 50% of my life is spent looking for an item I just had in my hand a moment ago. It’s almost enough to make me change my mind about athiesm because it sometimes seems that some invisible being has to be fucking with me, picking things up and moving them when my back is turned.
I’ve long since given up worrying when I lose something. I know it will turn up as soon as I give up on looking for it. In fact, if I’m not looking for it, I will trip over it, or it will fall on me in whichever way will leave the most painful bruise.
I’ve also had to give up on trying to remember appiontments. Writing myself notes doesn’t help-- can’t find the note. Calling me beforehand as a friendly reminder doesn’t help-- I’ll forget about it in an hour or so. Few things are worse than that sinking feeling of seeing your spouse come into the room dressed in a suit saying impatiently, “Aren’t you ready to go?” Go where? Don’t I remember? No, no I don’t.
Yesterday, I went in to work, stuck the 6 page midterm into the copier. Realized that I forgot to hit the button which would result in nice stapled stacks of papers, and searched for a cancel button. Found it, hit it, and started again. This time all went well until a co-worker spoke to me, I gave her a copy of the midterm, picked up the rest of the finished copies and walked off.
10 minutes later, I hear two co-workers trying to unjam the copier–no big, it happens often. Co-worker 1 says to co-worker to “did you get all the copies you needed?” “Oh, these aren’t mine, I don’t know whose they are, I just thought I’d fix the copier”
Shortly afterwards, I wrote names on two midterms, and got worried about whether I had enough copies. 10,12, 13 . . . Uh-oh, I’ve got two classes of 20. Walked in by the copier, and there are my other 30 copies. I was the dingbat who’d walked off from the copier.
In fairness, I think someone distracted me. But, i should have known I didn’ t have enough copies made yet by the height of the stack.
I also walked off without my 3-ring binder later in the day.
and we won’t discuss how long I looked for my wallet one day.
I lost a running shoe a few weeks ago. Just the one. It amazes me that this was even possible, since the following details the entirety of my use of these running shoes.
Put on running shoes.
Go running.
Remove running shoes.
I finally broke down and bought myself a new pair. I still haven’t found the missing shoe, even though my room is not large and both it and the house are kept relatively uncluttered. I suppose I’ll find it when I move.
Also, more and more I have experienced that flash of panic that you get when you pat down your pockets to make sure you’ve remembered your keys, and you find that they are not there. I often have these moments while driving.
I lost my passport two days before I was to fly out for the Hong Kong handover in '97. Packing, I said to myself, “where’s my passport?” Where it usually is you fool, I replied. “Where’s that?” Christ knows.
Cue panicked ripping-house-to-pieces, to no avail, followed by late-night booking of a flight to London the next morning, in order to facilitate an early morning trip to the passport office and several hours’ wait for the paperwork.
Three years later I moved house, and as I unpacked, was flicking through Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and found that I’d been using my old passport as a bookmark. I never finished the book either.
I have a type of car that is quite common around here (cypress green 98 Civic) and I will sometimes *drive by * a parked one and think, “I don’t remember parking there”.
Recently I planned to drive my car to the bus station and take a bus to the city. For safety’s sake, my friends were going to go pick it up and keep at their house, and then leave it back at the station for me to pick up the day I got back. Granted I was exhausted from worrying about the medical emergency I was travelling for, but I could not make heads or tails about the plan, who needed what keys, what I was supposed to do. Thank goodness these friends were on top of things and I could follow their very simple instructions. Keep this key. Park. We’ll do the rest.
And the worst is when I sometimes find it in my other hand after 20 minutes of searching :smack:
I could see certain problems with using that method with babies, too.
I do that, too. And I pat my other pocket looking for my cell phone at work. For more than a year now, I have worked in a building where I am not allowed to bring my cell phone inside.
Count me in - have something in my hand and I’ll lose it, same for the keys while driving. I’ve done the glasses thing too AND looked for my cell phone whilst talking on it. Looked in my bag for my wallet while it’s in my hand. Lost my lip gloss while applying it. Lost a mirror while LOOKING at it.
I’m 17.
Good heavens, Lissa! Your remark wasn’t offensive! I certainly wasn’t offended and I doubt if any one else was. If anything, your post was amusing and my reply about the dead babies in cars was heavy-handed and it’s I who should apologize to you.
Amen on the habits! If I didn’t have habits about where I put the important things, I wouldn’t be able to function.
Moving disrupts everything, however. It took more than a year for three critical items I’d misplaced in the move to turn up. I still haven’t found the bunch of refrigerator magnets. And I packed every box myself!
I’m quite a creature of habit when it comes to where I might have left my cel phone. Nevertheless, I spent an hour searching for it yesterday (Normally I would call it and track it from the sound, but the battery had lost its charge, so that didn’t work). It turned up under the couch in the computer room. I think what happened is that it fell out of my pocket while I was sitting in my computer chair (as it often does) and one of the cats batted it under the couch. They’re both blaming the other cat, though, so I don’t know who did it.
I rely on habit quite a bit- I’m only good about taking the Pill because it’s part of my morning routine, at which time I’m pretty much on autopilot.
I solved that problem by marrying someone who has much better vision than mine (almost 20/20, actually). If I can’t find my glasses (which I can’t if they’re not in one of the usual places and I don’t have my glasses), I yell for him and get him to help me. I’m quite paranoid about taking them off anywhere other than my bedroom or bathroom, too- I make a point of remembering where I put them, and I’ll ask someone else if they’ll help me find them later if someone is around who might be able to do that.
Even with all that, I’ve looked for my glasses when I was wearing them, just like sneezy5660…
That’s not God- that’s gremlins. They’re invisible, and they pick stuff up and move it when you’re not looking. Often, they put it back in the place where you had put it after you enlist someone else in the search, to make you look dumb. They also put typos in your posts and emails. I have a theory that gremlins may be the same thing as greebles, those creatures that are invisible to humans but visible to cats (they’re what your cat is staring at when it’s staring at some point and you don’t see anything there).
