After I asked the question, I quickly sensed this was the sort of thing that would land me cleanly in the midst of family folklore, the source of those humorous anecdotes that are told at weddings and Thanksgiving dinners and live on through generations. It would get laughs for my wife at dinner parties and for my kids among their teen friends. I could imagine Matt Lauer saying in his news segment segue “So, Ann, did you hear about the man in Maryland who….”

All I said was this:  “Has anyone seen my glasses?”

However, I was wearing a pair. And had a pair on the top of my head. And a pair stuck in the collar of my shirt. Honestly. And, there was a pair in the drawer immediately to my right, though thankfully no witnesses knew that.

But, sadly, there was no ridicule. No jokes. No barbs. There were simply smirks and silence, like the reaction you might get from people surprised by that guy outside a mattress store dressed as a huge lobster or by child with his finger up his nose.  They weren’t flabbergasted; just taken aback momentarily and mildly amused. This is perhaps why.

I have lost:

• 23 pairs of glasses, I believe, mostly ill-fitting and odd-looking drug store models, purchased because I lost too many prescribed pairs.
• 7 watches (I once had two on my wrist, which was almost as troubling as wearing three pairs of glasses)
• 4 cell phones
• 6 golf clubs and 323 golf balls (during 15 rounds).
• An endless string of parked cars (once resulting in a garage search for nearly an hour in college with a woman I was trying to impress and her parents).
• An endless string of grocery shopping carts – in the store (in fact, vehicles of any sort – from skateboards and bikes as a child to airplanes at airport gates as an adult).
• A critical set of briefing papers for a state senator ready to begin his much-publicized committee meeting.
• The hand-written combination to a sturdy lock that was securing six bikes on a hot day just before a show the riders had gathered to see that was some distance away.
• The map (prior to cell phones and GPS devices) to a wedding we played a role in at a little rural church.
• Receipts for many, many things.
• Notes from a difficult-to-get interview for article that was due the next day to a prestigious publication.
• IKEA furniture parts ad nauseam in the midst of assembly
• Several dogs
• My aging mother
• My children
• A classroom of students

(In my defense, those in the last four items survived and deserved part of the blame, I think, having wandered away or, in my mother’s case, having thoughtlessly taken off her sweater  — a color I was looking for in the busy mall.)

It’s been with me as long as I recall. I seem to remember losing items like my favorite blankets, toys and articles of clothing often as a child, (once, my pants, or so the story goes) and spending large portions of my day searching for things.

All through school I lost things – books and homework and pencils. I still average a pen every 3 days at work.  I often lost my parents in crowded places. I once lost four friends on the top of a mountain during a hike, and began yelling for them frantically only to find they were standing conspicuously on a rock to my left, laughing, and memorizing the event for many future re-telling.

Others have adapted. My mother used to tie and pin things to me – mittens and wallets and keys and even, once, humiliatingly, a permission slip for a school event.  My wife makes allowances, verbal reminders, notes, things laid out conspicuously and sometimes by grabbing my hands and placing simple items in them, like a small-city mayor at a press conference handing over the keys to the city.

I know I am not alone. We have lost-and-found bins for people like us, and humbling loudspeaker announcements about ownerless car keys and children. We slow things down or hold things up. I once saw a young child sitting facing backward in a grocery cart turn to a busy cashier and say – “she’ll never find it,” as her mother searched frantically for her credit card in an overflowing purse. An unhappy crowd in a long-delayed plane I was on subtly booed when a passenger announced he’d left his computer in the terminal and the crew let him race to get it.

I had a roommate who suffered similarly – and we were always looking for things in a small college dorm room, and sometimes, conveniently, found the thing the other was searching for. He once lost his keys four times in a day, the final time throwing them out inadvertently. I saw a guy stomping down the street, searching through the material he was carrying, although what he was looking for, no doubt, was in a manila envelope stuck to his butt.

The theory that I support about the reason for such losses suggests an energetic, high-functioning brain that tries to grab too much, so some data are randomly tossed overboard as the vessel fills. Things, and any notion of where they are, simply float away. This is the flattering “geniuses are forgetful theory”, which I subtly promote by pointing out stories of befuddlement involving brilliant characters like Albert Einstein, Sherlock Holmes and the Absent Minded Professor, who in the old Disney movies soared around in the flying model T that he created, but lost things like children and his house.

There are other examples of brilliant people who lose things at the website for the Global Association for Distracted People, which, by the way, is currently polling members about how often they have to call their cell phone to find it.  (The other day I said my daughter’s name from another room and she called my phone immediately, not to be lazy but because she assumed I was searching for it.)

In another theory, less charitable observers might say its simply because we have tired or limited brains, unable to keep two things in our head at one time. So, for instance, if I’m going out, and my brain is consumed by complex activity like grabbing my coat and opening the door, I’m expected to also remember my keys?

There are more studies on the topic that you might think, perhaps because researcher types similarly suffer and want to know why. A group of researchers from Japan did a study very directly entitled “Why do people lose their own things?” and  (through translation, I believe) concluded, “From the analysis on the interviews, easiness to lose things depends on features of things (sizes and shapes, etc.) And ways of interactions between people and things (frequencies of uses, usages, etc)”. They also pointed to situations where “a deviation arose in normal sequences, because in such a situation people tend to lose their things.”

I think that means that I’m more likely to lose a watch battery than, say, an elephant, especially if I don’t change my watch battery often and if I’m changing it one time while slightly inebriated in a snowstorm in the entryway of a CVS – an actual occasion when I did lose not just one watch battery, but two. I’ve proven this Japanese theory here and many other times.

There is also a lot of research about solutions – and techniques we can try to find things. One suggests we “pretend we are the missing item”. Isn’t that a lot like “If I were a Phillips screw driver where, would I be?”  a version of a phrase that always irritatingly comes to mind during my many searches and never seems to pay off.

Other strategies suggest things like organizing items better, taking your time and writing things down. One expert at Self Growth.com recommends this:  “I want you to think about where you would go to find item A and then put it there.” And isn’t that a bit like a judge releasing a serial killer with the admonition:  “be nice now”.

I have developed over time my own strategies – a collection of file folders for all sorts of things (one is labeled “stuff” and others “house stuff”, “old stuff”, “important stuff” and “$ stuff”, unfortunately, which confuses me at times and causes me not file some things, which then tend to get lost.  Cupboards and drawers are organized by patterns in my brain, which seems to confuse others (the “repair drawer”, for instance, contains the sewing kit, masking tape, hammer, band aids and the manual to the new blender) I leave things in “might get lost” bins, baskets and bags, which works until the baskets overflow or the bags get lost, multiplying the problem.

I continually compensate and seek new ways to improve. I had one particularly good list of strategies to avoid losing things and techniques for finding them, but I haven’t seen it lately. It was right here…

 

 

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