I’m not going to look for it. The more I look for it and don’t find it, the more pissed off I get, and I don’t want to get pissed off. I tried that button on the base unit that’s supposed to make the handset beep, but I didn’t hear a beep.
I think Mr. Rilch accidentally took it in his car. If not, I’ll tell him I can’t find it when he gets up tomorrow. Of course, he’ll locate it in some wildly improbable place, like the crawl space, inside a box of insulation, from 1995, and then scoff at me because I didn’t look hard enough. It was the same thing yesterday with my double-shot glass: I looked in the cabinet above the sink multiple times, as I did the other cabinets and anywhere else a shot glass might hide…but it didn’t occur to me to move the coffee mug that was wayyyyy out of my reach (hell, the whole shelf is out of my reach) to reveal the shot glass wedged into the corner behind it.
I tell you what Dale: if a missing item turns up someplace where I could not have put it, I am not taking responsibility for losing track of it.
And then Friend has to get on my case when I tell him, “I can’t bear the loss of that shot glass! A very dear, very close friend gave it to me in Pittsburgh, and it got us through two and a half years of dedicated drinking, and now I’ve lost touch with him, but I still have the glass, so it’s like all I have left of him!” He gave me all this noise about being materialistic and obsessive compulsive, and wondered why I couldn’t be like him, who lets so much of what he owns slip through his fingers like water.
I didn’t want to antagonize him, because I knew he was pushing to make a deadline before going away this weekend, but when he comes back, I am going to pick up the thread and say, “Did you ever think about maybe keeping better track of your shit?” Yeah, I’m compulsive about caring for my stuff, and always putting it in its designated place…and that’s why I am able to hold onto stuff for ten years or more! I own things that were just crap when I bought them, but I’ve kept them in better shape than SOTA items others bought at the same time, which they allowed to wither and die. (Except for glassware; it breaks despite my best efforts. And I mend my clothes as many times as necessary, but sometimes it just becomes a lost cause.)
Friend also said, when I told him the history of the shot glass, “It’s not like your grandma gave it to you on your deathbed!” I’ll tell him, as well, that the circumstances of the double-shot glass are, to me, no less special than an elderly relative’s last-gasp bequest. More so, really; my paternal grandma auctioned all her stuff before going into the nursing home, and my maternal grandma left me a pair of gloves.
So Mr. Rilch can find the damn phone himself.
