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.
