How long does something have to be missing before you consider it lost?
 

How long does something have to be misplaced before you replace it? I'm not talking 10mm sockets, bigger stuff.

Two weeks ago tomorrow, the wife worked late, came home, threw her stuff somewhere, and grabbed something to eat. The next day she went off somewhere with her sister-in-law, she didn't drive. That was the last time she saw the key to her car. She's been using the spare key, but I'm really nervous she's going to misplace that one too. She already lost one key blade when the hinge on the remote cracked, the blade went flying somewhere and it was never seen again.

The thing that bugs me is she doesn't seem overly concerned that it is gone. "It will turn up" she say. But since the key has to be learned to the car, and if you lose both keys it gets really expensive, I worry.

Unrelated, but we also seem to be missing a soup bowl with the cover. How does a bowl go missing? She swears she didn't take it to work.

The soup bowl with cover is in your garage full of degreaser and car parts, you’re welcome.

My used car only came with one remote, so I’ve been living in “fear” of losing it. I need to buy another, but it is a dealer program situation like yours. Likely $300+. Dang, I miss brass keys...

I don’t normally misplace things, except when I haven’t moved from where I used the thing and can’t figure out where I set it down.

maybe airtag or similar the keys. Sure it wouldn't work for soup bowl.

I found my Snap-On 3/8" ratchet and a pair of Oakley sunglasses years after they were lost but I've never found keys my wife has truly lost.

When I really need to find something, I buy a new one. Then the lost one shows up...almost every time.

You're sweating. She's not.

Get a quote for keys replacement. Let her know you are concerned b/c you've heard it cost X amount of $$$$ to replace them both vs. lesser X amount to replace one.

Then get on with life. If she loses the other key, let her sweat (if for nothing else, you asked her to take it seriously and she didn't).

I know I've misplaced stuff, but since I can't seem to remember what it was, it doesn't really matter.

I have actually walked around the garage scratching my head with the screwdriver I was looking for.

I have never lost a wallet or a set of keys, never.

Wife: Somebody call all my phone

Me: s'it in your car?

Wife: Nope.

Me: Downstairs?

Wife: Don't know, have to look. Continues to watch her TV show.

I can't understand why some people just can't put things back or find a place for the same items. My utility knife and two mid side screw driver is always in my desk drawers along with the garage opener and keys, phone and wallet. What is so difficult about that? My younger boy is very good. When he was old enough to take off his own shoe while having to sit to do so, would put his shoe in the corner at grandma's house. My older old, would kick it across the room and leave it there if we don't catch him. This is something one is born with?

I know the same people who are always looking for their siht due to lack of self discipline about putting things back in its place.

I had a guy that worked for us. Daily he would borrow tools or power tools so he can finish up his task. By the end of the day, the men had to go around the job site to pick up all their personal tools from Tape measures, extension cords and simple suppliers like boxes of wire nuts. That SOB will just hop in his car and go home. After two week of complains from others, I had a talk with him. It got better for one day so I decided to pay everyone over time for cleaning up his crap, and anything lost came out of his pay check. It was about 1500 bucks. That siht stopped immediately. I had to let him go after 4 months.

If its something that can be replaced, I don't really sweat it unless it is a high dollar item. If not, I neither buy another or it will show up on it own eventually. When I worked for my father, we would drop a small diamond then it goes bouncing into some corner within the shop. We get on all fours and find it eventually. Some of the time, it would take a few hours and we had to move a bunch of crap but usually it comes up within 10 min of looking. Fun days. I normally get deflated when I drop something small in my office. I hear it bounce, then gone! I know if we can find that 'lil diamond, the small screw can easily be found.

Funny. That happened to me this morning. My kid and I were about walk out of the house to go riding. I had my water bottle and the one key I use when I go out for a ride between my fingers on the same hand that was holding the bottle. I walked in my office, looked in my drawers and started muttering some bad thing out of my potty mouth. He said, isn't that in your hand? :rolleyes:

This is what I'd do, but explaiin to her now that she will be the one to handle the situation if it comes up. If she looses the key, let her solve the problem. Don't gloat over it, but just don't solve it for her.

Ha. I once freaked out because I couldn't find my toddler daughter while she was papoosed to my back.

I often take my glasses off to do close cramped work like under the dash because I can’t tilt my head back far enough for the progressive lens thing to focus. Of course, stuff gets blurry without my glasses or when they’re dirty or dusty like when sweeping the garage or whatever.

Anyways, when everything is blurry I’m constantly looking for my glasses that I’m already wearing. One time the ophthalmologist person put those damn drops in my eyes. A few minutes later she said follow me. I said I can’t because I need to find my glasses…I think that was when I realized people look at me and see some kinda old guy who shouldn’t be driving.

Just the darn small screw that drops in my garage floor. My garage is way too full. I lose the little ones. Too many places to bounce to.

Big ol' blanket under whatever I'm working on usually catches those little suckers.

This has happened to me once or twice. I buy a new one and think "Now where would be a good place to put this?" Duh, there is the original one.

I too have never lost or even misplaced my keys. Same with my wallet.

My tools however have the ability to transport themselves to the most unlikely places if they are not in my hand, currently being used. I spend a larger percentage of my time in the garage looking for a tool I was just using minutes before than I should. They have never vanished or been lost, just hiding.

I still have a complete set of sockets and the wrench and two extensions I bought in 1970 for my first car. I still use them. Japanese made Fuller brand and never even had to rebuild the ratchet.

If it is a 10mm socket, gone the moment it drops and I can't find it.
If it is something I know I used in the house and haven't left the house since I used it, it will show up...

I once went for a bike ride up and down the street with my daughter when she was little (maybe 8 years old?). After we got back, I took a shower but then realized my wallet wasn't on the dresser (same spot it always goes when I get home). I looked everywhere. We walked the route we rode to see if it fell out of my pocket - no joy. I called the credit card company and cancelled the card (I only had one card back then). Shortly after that, I remembered that after my shower I put on a pair of shorts instead of the pants I wore when we rode bikes. There in the closet was my pants with the wallet. Doh!
Good news, I didn't have to get a new drivers license and I didn't lose the cash.
Bad news, I had to wait for a new card.

I lost my virginity, but I still have the box it came in!

Post of the week, right there.

I would take this advice, but we're going to use this car in about a week to drive to Chicago. She has Tuesday off. I'm going to send her to the locksmith. I like having two sets of keys when we travel, even if one set gets locked in the car.

Too much time in the computer industry I guess. We have redundant systems for most everything.

Sometime in the mid 1980s, I bought a pair of Danner boots. Tall, insulated, waterproof. I wore them backpacking in the Sierras, hiking in the San Bernadinos, snow camping in the Angeles Crest, durimg ice storms in Portland, everywhere a tough, warm, waterproof boot was needed. They were resoled a couple times and absorbed a couple gallons of Sno-Seal over the years. My son, who was born ling after I bought the boots, used them for a summer working in the Tahoe mountains, then got his own Danners. Thosr boots had history.

About five years ago, my boots disappeared. I looked everywhere, ranted and wept, finally concluded they’d been stolen off my porch by scumbag homeless thieves. The next few years were spent in mourning. Finally I went to Danner - which is right here in Portland Ore - and bought a replacement pair. The model is the “Elk Hunter” and in 2022 dollars they cost four hundred. I think that must have been a month’s rent when I bought my original Danners. My new boots looked awkwardly, well, new. They are a year old now and still look new. They are excellent boots, but everytimr I look at them, I am reminded of my old lost friends.

My wife has a problem, that perhaps your spouses do. She occasionally has fits of house-cleaning rage. The house is a mess, your (meaning my) stuff is everywhere, this doesn’t belong in my (meaning her) living room and neither does that, and so on, shriller and shriller. During these fits, she can go into a “cleaning coma”, where she puts the offending object anywhere that it can be out of sight. She could stuff the Hope Diamond behind the refrigerator, or a small child into a laundry chute, and have no memory of it. I’ve often thought that this is how I will eventually meet my end, yanked off her couch, wadded into a small wet ball, and crammed into the hallway linen closet.

She opened a drawer under my closet. This drawer is five feet wide, sticks and jams, I never use it, hardly know it is there. Apparently this is where she keeps the pants she buys for me that I don’t wear, and has done for a decade. Dozens of pairs of pants. She exclaimed “look what I found!” and pulled out my old Danner boots, that she had stuffed there several years ago, along with my old and beloved Tumi shoulder bag that mysteriously disappeared a year ago. Suffice to say I refused to give her credit for finding what she lost, and suffice equally to say she denies ever placing the boots or bag there.

So now I have old and new Danner boots. I am thinking of sending the old ones to Danner to be “recrafted”, which is a service they offer. They may be a bit too far gone for that, but maybe not, I’m not going to ask them to look like new. Which then begs the question: what do I do with two pairs of Danner Elk Hunter boots?

That's me and my wife. I pretty much always know where everything is. If I don't know where something is, 9/10 times, it's because my wife has moved it from where I put it.

My wife never puts stuff down in the same place twice. Over the course of 3-4 hours, she can take her glasses off and set them down in 5 different places.

Our spouses must be related. I’m a creature of habit. I put everything in the same place and if it’s not there, I might forget to take/use/etc. She constantly moves my stuff cleaning up.

Drives me nuts, as I don’t touch or move her stuff.

That's how I lost a fortune in baseball cards. A shoebox with a full set of every Yankee team from 1958 to the mid 60's. She thought they were childish. I told her she just bought a beach house for the trash man.

If you replace, you will find it.

I lost a fenix flashlight for months. I found it cleaning out the truck a few weeks after I bought the replacement. That's happened more than once.

Looking for your Sunglasses, patting your pocket, head, and find you're wearing them.

Not your ex-wife. You are a gracious man.

Come to think of it, I'm missing a pair of boots too. I also ended up buying another pair, although I haven't run across the originals yet.

The worst part of this whole key thing is that for Christmas 2022 she gave me a hand carved wooden bowl with Odin's ravens on it, and what I hoped was a deep meaning phrase carved around the outside, but no, it's just a rune alphabet. I'm supposed to keep my keys in it, and I do, along with my watch, wedding ring and work ID. But she will dump other things in the bowl that she thinks are mine, pens, dead batteries, etc. There's probably 100 pens in this house. She keeps bringing them home from work. I've had the same pen for 15 + years. Lost it for a while but then I found it where she put it.

I guess my wife's Alzheimer's isn't that bad then. But I do have to go looking in the kitchen and cupboards for a utensil. It can be anywhere nowadays.

I have lost things in the garage. 9 times out of 10 I find it when I pull out a box of screws, nails, or anything stored that is not in a tool box. I don't lose tools in tools boxes. I leave them in power tool cases or bins of supplies.

I once found a loupe that had been missing for years in a box of misc wiring. I must have been reading the printing on the insulation.

My wife likes to reorganize things in ways she feels are more efficient.
Then she gets upset with me when I can't find stuff.

Maybe I'm going mad (or more mad than usual) but I found my car keys in the fridge and half a tin of dog food where the keys go :(

The wife has the day off today and is running the dogs to the vet and the groomer. I asked her to make another stop, and $115 later, we have a second key. Worse than I expected, but better than it could have been. When we bought the car it came with one key. I bought another off eBay and had a traveling locksmith cut the new one. The process to learn the new fob to the car is relatively simple. I think it cost maybe $35 total, $15 for the fob, $20 for the cut.

Fun fact. On the newer GM vehicles, not only does the car learn the fob, the fob learns the car, or at least sets itself as "paired". You can not take a used fob and pair it to another vehicle without divorcing it from the first car. That's not something you can do without special equipment, so it's easier to buy a unpaired fob, although you're probably not going to get a genuine GM setup.

With her old car I was able to take any fob and get the car to recognize it.

Still haven't found my boots, or the soup bowl. It's not in the garage with parts cleaner, I use other containers for that. I used a round cookie tin one time, found out it wasn't water tight, or the solvent made it not so. Made a mess.

The wife has also put keys in the fridge. Maybe I need to go through the freezer. Never found dog food where the keys should be, but she has tried to feed them twice. The little fat one always acts like he's starving, even if you've just fed him.

Everything in my garage is organized by the Dewey Decimal System.

In the house, I keep everything alphabetically. Like this:

Eighth
Fifth
First
Fourth
Ninth
Second
Seventh
Sixth
Tenth
Third

Yer dawg is just messin' wif your head ...

I's never trusted that dawg. In fact that's the last time I get a dawg that's smarter than me.

I FOUND MY BOOTS!

My stepdaughter and granddaughter visited last week for spring break (My stepdaughter is a teacher, not a college student)

Apparently the wife's go to place to hide stuff is a pile in the walk-in closet in the master bedroom. Normally I ignore this, but it grew last week. I moved a couple things, and there were my boots, along with a hat I've been looking for for a long time.

Haven't found her missing car key. Haven't found the missing diamond earring, but that's her problem. I've got my favorite hat back.

My favorite utility knife, with snap point blades vanished. I looked in all the places I would have put it down or had used it, and nothing. It was gone. So I went to Amazon and looked. A single one was 11 bucks, but a box of 10 was 12 bucks. So I now have a lifetime supply of them. As I went to put them up, there was my old knife.

This is how I do it. Works every time