My Husband Loses Things

They say opposites attract and it’s a good thing because if my husband married a woman like himself they would spend eternity playing hide and go seek. He can lose things better than anyone I know. If there was an occupation for people who could hide things he would be a huge success in that field.

Instead, he's a budget analyst, he can't find his house shoes but can find an error on a spreadsheet.

He spends half his life looking for things he’s lost. Fussing, cussing and discussing where he could possibly have left his “fill in the blank.”

Car keys, driver’s license, birth certificate, passport, keys to rental properties, computer cable, brief case, television remotes, DVD remotes and running shoes are some of the things he’s lost in recent months. As you can see he makes sure it’s important things that get misplaced.

He thinks I’m a smart aleck because I almost never lose my possessions and also am very good at helping him find his. Not that I’d make a good private investigator but I am pretty good at locating missing items.

Sometimes I’m busy and think to myself, “I’m going to let him find his own things this time, I have more important things to do than run around finding a grown man’s stuff.” It never fails, I am soon caught up in the hunt feeling sorry for him especially if he has to be somewhere soon and the item at large is a key element, in fact it probably is a key and he won’t get very far without it.

I’ve tried to tell him, “You need to tell yourself where you put things. When you lay your wallet down look at it and make a mental note, ‘I’ve put my wallet on the clothes dryer’ and then ask yourself, ‘why am I putting my wallet on the clothes dryer? Because you know that isn’t where it belongs.”

“I know I know I should pay more attention but I forget.”

It sometimes works for a little while especially after losing something important but then a few days or weeks later he’ll be running around like a chicken with his head cut off trying to find something else.

We’ve had people bring his wallet to him (they found it on the side of the road, we think he left it on the roof of his car) with all the money still inside. Yeah, he’s lucky. I teased him and asked if he threw his wallet out the window while driving down the road. He didn’t think that was funny.

He has lost cell phones, people will bring him his wallet complete with credit cards and large sums of money intact but keep his phone. Go figure.

People who lose things on a regular basis are usually aggravated with people like me who almost never lose anything. If my stuff disappears it’s normally because someone else moved it.

It’s because he is preoccupied with too many other things and paying attention to where he put his cup isn’t at the top of the list of things on his mind. And quite possibly it’s also because he has a personal finder that will locate his stuff after he’s misplaced them.