The weirdest thing happened earlier today, and when we began discussing it later, we noticed this had happened several times, so I thought Id share and you Dopers could share simialr experiences, I cant be the only one this has happened to!
Basically I was helping my sister clean out her room today and I was tidying her bags, putting them in their dust covers and onto a shelf in the wardrobe, one of the bags didnt have a dust cover, so my sister went to look for it, and eventualy found it in a bedside locker, so she announced she found it and threw it over to me. I was doing something else and turned back to get it and it was nowhere to be found. So we figured it just fell somewhere and we were being stupid (there were clothes everywhere) anyway later when the room was tidied we remembered the dustcover and that it hadnt turned up. Completely weird. The only explanation is that it ended up it the bag for the donated clothes but how that would happen is beyond me as I was no where near that bag.
Anyway we were looking for it anyway and my sister just anounnces “another black hole” and she tells me how years ago she had a night brace that had a little case it was stored in when it wasnt used. The lid of the case fell on the floor one day and couldnt be found. The carpet in that room was taken up maybe 2 weeks after that happened and it still never turned up.
I remember another time when I was little I was sick so was sleeping in my parents bed, it was daytime, so I was the only one there. I had a hair clip in my hair and took it out because it was uncomfortable, I remember putting on the bedside locker, but when I woke up later it was gone. It never turned up.
The final example I could think of then also happened years ago, I was about seven, I had made a shoebox house for a My Little Pony, and was playing with it in the front room when my mother told me to clean up because we were going to town. So I put everything in the corner and went off. When I came back the house was still there but the Pony was gone, I remember it because we had a heap of the adult ponies but only one baby pony, and without her the Lullaby Nursey was useless.
Yep – a couple of years ago, I was working in my home office. Fingers started swelling, so I took my rings off while I could. One fell to the floor. Turned the room upside down (literally – moving and upending furniture, in case the ring was caught on a chair rung or such,) but never again saw the ring. It wouldn’t have been so bad, but the ring in question was my Mom’s wedding band.
Of course, sometimes “black hole” is just a shorthand term for “my silly blindness.” A few months ago, I lost my keyring – house keys, car keys, storage house, EVERYTHING. I searched the entire house, and finally concluded that my uncle had accidentally taken them – unlocked the storage and stuck them in his pocket, or somesuch. Three weeks later, I found the keys between the stove and the cabinet. Lesson? Clean under the appliances more often! (Or, realistically, get extras made of all my important keys, since my major claim to being “domestic” is that I live in a house.)
We have problems with things that mysteriously re-appear. For example: we we were moving our stuff into this house, and the next thing unpacked was my dad’s golf bag. Inside it were all his regular clubs, plus my grandfather’s very special putter. Except the putter wasn’t there. My parents searched the bag inside and out–counting every club over and over, dozens of times. The putter wasn’t there. It wasn’t in the moving truck, any other box, or anywhere else. None of us could find it, no matter how hard we looked. And then, not an hour or two later, we went back to the golf back–as we had several times throughout the search–and voila, it was there. And it most certaintly wasn’t there before.
This has happened with a number of things we’ve given up as lost in our house. But there’s still a good share of things that disappear into that nasty black hole, never to be seen again. Half of my socks, for instance.
Absolutely. When I was growing up and something disappeared that had no business disappearing, we would say that the house got hungry and ate it.
Later, I saw an episode of The Twilight Zone in which a hapless couple slip through the regular confines of time and find themselves backstage. There are small men who build all the sets that people occupy during any given moment of regular temporal continuity. Occasionally, the builders will forget a prop, but the next time they build that set, they will include it, which leads to the frustration of looking endlessly for something, leaving, coming back, and then finding it.
Considering some of the weirdness of my everyday life, I find this to be a cogent and logical explanation.
What’s also weird, in my house, is how things blink in AND OUT of the black hole. F’rinstance, I can be looking for something and I look in, say, a particular drawer. I take everything out and it’s not there. Later, I will look there again, as I’ve gone through every possible location in the house once, and it IS there. Sweartogod it was not there the first time I looked.
The ultimate mystery was several years ago when I went to do our taxes. I had put all tax-related stuff in one particular place (the back corner of the dining room table, to be exact). So I get a pencil and a calculator (this was pre-computer) and reached for the pile o’ stuff and… WTF? Nothing there. And of course no one in the household had moved it or thrown it out. I know, because I asked everyone, and they all vehemently denied ever having touched the receipts, W2s, etc. These important documents were never seen again, so I had to re-acquire the W2s, the mortgage statements, everything.
