While hunting yet again for the DVD remote–the baby’s favorite toy of the moment–I started thinking about other things I’ve misplaced (or have been misplaced for me). The worst was probably my passport on the night before a business trip to Hong Kong, with various tax return items a close second. Do you have any stories about pulling your hair while looking through the same stack of things for the umpteenth time, only to find the thing you were looking for hours, days, or weeks later in some incredibly obscure (or incredibly obvious) location?
I don’t have many interesting stories I can think of offhand, but I do know of a colleague whose son decided to stuff Dad’s wallet in his Spongebob Squarepants backpack to take to school one day (show and tell?), and Dad didn’t find it until after he had been searching frantically for a month, and had cancelled all his credit cards.
When I was about 22, I somehow lost (in the process of a move) a box containing all the thousands of photos I’d taken in my life up until then. All my photos from the two years of high school I spent in Japan, photos from high school, photos from all the places I’d lived, the people I’d known, the vacations I’d taken, etc. Gone.
Still not found; thirteen years later, it’s not looking likely.
Way back in 1970, I bought a framed letter and photograph of the composer Rachmaninoff. The letter was typed, on his letterhead, and hand signed. It was a personal letter to a music teacher whose student recital he had attended. On the right was a signed autograph of the composer. They were double-matted in a gorgeous gold-leaf frame.
In 1975, I was moving from one NYC apartment to another, with the help of a few friends and a van. Everything else made it, but that one piece mysteriously disappeared.
I had paid $100 for in in 1970. Today it would be worth many thousands. Not that I would have ever sold it.
I hope at least somebody has it who can appreciate it, rather than being trashed.
He’s a great guy, but my dad has done a couple of boneheaded things WRT misplaced objects:
First, while on a road trip to DC, he left his wallet full of credit cards (mostly for various gas station chains) on top of a gas pump in South Hill, Virginia. He had about 10-15 cards in that wallet, and spent the next couple of days cancelling them all. Pretty bad, but a standard thing to do, it would seem.
Then, some years ago, my older brother was wondering what had happened to his poster collection from his youth. In particular, there was an old poster map of Middle Earth from the Tolkien novels that he really wanted to find. We didn’t have much luck in the first go-round, but a couple of years later I stumbled across some of his posters in a part of the attic that no one had bothered to check. His Middle Earth poster was there all right, but it was what else I found, hung on the wall, that floored me: two posters that he had presumably bought when he attended the 1976 Olympics in Montreal. They were promotional posters for the 1980 Moscow games, featuring the NBC Sports logo. Bear in mind that the US boycotted those games, meaning little to no additional promotional items for them, and NBC did not carry full coverage of the games. So, potentially valuable items, and yet my dad had STAPLED them to the wall of the attic! :smack:
Fortunately, the poor things are now framed, as far from a staple gun as I can take them.
In separate incidents, the childrens’ birth certificates, and the registration sticker for my car. They were never found and eventually had to be replaced.
The thing that eats at me is that these were such important papers. Surely I put them in a place I considered safe and did my best to look after them properly? Evidently I was wrong about that. In other words, any of my most precious possessions could disappear at any time! This happened years ago, and yet it still gnaws at me from time to time…what could have possibly happened to those things???
Does it have to be something you lost? I’m seriously considering renting a deposit box next time Mom comes visit. Or maybe hiring a sumo fighter to sit on top of her whenever I’m not in the room.
Switzerland is not part of the EU, so I needed my passport to come here. Ah. Right. Passport…
After looking in every place I could think of, every drawer and box, I went to the Police station, reported it lost. The lieutenant says “lost or stolen?” “Misplaced in my house.” “OK, can’t you look for it?” “Considering that my mother was the last person to see it and she claims it’s ‘in a safe place’ but can’t remember where, it could be under one of the bathroom tiles. One which doesn’t move.” “Ah, one of those… OK, ‘lost’ and ‘don’t bother look for it’” (yep, they actually have a way to codify don’t bother look for it, of course they use different words).
Report in hand, I moved over to the ID Desk. The officer there (who may have been any kind of grade, but she was in civvies as the ID people usually are) looked at my information, called up my file and said “didn’t you also lose another one back in '89?” “My mother organizes my house.” “Oh God, so does mine!” No more questions: pictures please, thumb please, all in all it took less than one hour.
The passport I lost in '89 popped up ten years later. My mother had stuck it at the bottom of her safe. I noticed there was something there one day that a ring had fallen and she called me to fish it out… and no, my “current” lost passport isn’t there
I was building a big figure model of the Rocketeer. Well, it was a vinyl kit, and the detail on his rocketpack was a little soft, so I’d cut away a crummy-looking molded-in grille and had just spent a hour or so building a new, wonderfully detailed one.
And then it flipped out of my hands across the room, and fell into a time warp; it was sent seven years into the future, where I found it under a shelf.
Well, let’s see. There was the beautiful heriloom Zuni turquoise and silver brooch that my Mom gave me. It disappeared during a move in college.
More recently, I was cleaning my office and managed to throw out with the trash my entire set of keys – house keys, car keys, remote to my husband’s car, and my master key to the buildings here. Boy, it sure was fun calling the campus police and explaining to them why I needed a new master key. (And people wonder why I never clean my office. Bad things happen when I clean!)
My bank card and driver’s license. I was a little freaked out, thinking i nad dropped them downtown, but not too much as I figured I couldn’t do much about it. I was more worried about the license than the bank card, which I quickly replaced. I needed a new license anyways, as it was close to expiring, but I still didn’t like the idea that someone could be using my old one as a fake ID.
A couple days after I got a new license I found both cards in the front pocket of my Discman bag. (I really outta look there more often, I later did the same with my–expired–passport and birth certificate)
(setup:) Two weeks before my wedding, I left my keys hanging in our apartment mailbox. One of our neighbors was kind enough to take them and keep them as souvenirs, or something. Anyway, never seen again.
Two DAYS before my wedding, I picked up my jeans to put them on, and out came the replacement door and mailbox keys, which I hadn’t yet put on a keyring. The door key, I picked up and stuck back in my pocket. The mail key fell into a wormhole and is apparently floating in space right now.
I tore the apartment up looking for it, eventually having a panic attack since some needed stuff for the wedding was in our mailbox waiting. Never turned up. Right after the wedding, we moved out of that apartment. Key never turned up.
Seriously, a wormhole. It was like ghost-story weird how this key managed to vanish.
When I was in 1st grade, I did an oil pastel still life for my school’s art and science fair. Took first prize out of the entire school. Not a bad little piece of art either, if you enjoy the post-impressionist style.
My mother proudly framed it and hung it on the wall, until one day we noticed it was just… gone. Disappeared from the wall, never to be seen again. To this day, she will remind me of it occasionally and laugh about the “thief” who thought he was making off with a masterpiece.
I don’t know if I lost it (my mom says she gave it to me, but I have no memory of that), but I haven’t seen my birth certificate in years. I lost my DL in the Denver airport during a layover. Fortunately it was pre-9/11 so I was able to get on the plane without photo ID. I lost (or had stolen) my pearl/rhinestone jewelry from my wedding. Had a small collection of copper jewelry accidentally thrown away.
A box of press photos, once owned by Herb Caen. Herb Caen, the SF Chronicle columnist, who once had an “office” in Honolulu. This way he could regularly have his newspaper pay for his [del]vacation[/del] office trip to Islands. It contained pictures of guests on the Mike Douglas Show, pictures of this new TV show called Star Trek, and all those pictures that used to appear in the Entertainment section of the paper.
A program signed by 42 of the 43 starters from the Winston Cup race at Sears Point Raceway in 1991. The three signatures on the cover were Dale Earnhart, Davey Allison (used the D in Dale for the D in Davey) and Neil Bonnet. Bonnet also signed his picture on the inside as Jaques Debris, it was based on a story he told on TV a few years earlier. I had just had one of the lesser known drivers sign the program and went off searching for the last signature I needed. I put the program in a backpack I was wearing and 5 minutes later when I went to take it back out, it was gone. I retraced my steps and never found it. This was late Saturday afternoon and by the time a bought another program, most of the drivers were gone and I did not have a ticket for pit access on Sunday. I still have the second program but it is not the same, the only signature on the cover is Jimmy Spencer’s.
once owned by Herb Caen.