Everyone remember the Thomas Dolby hit, “She Blinded Me With Science?” There’s a line in there, spoken by the mad scientist voice, proclaiming, “She’s tidied up and now I can’t find anything!”
I’m in a similar situation here, with the added complication that I may have inflicted the problem on myself.
My Wife is over at my sis’s place, learning how to sew, and I’m supposed to be joining them there with the fixings for dinner and the parts for a stationary-crafting project. I’ve got the food, the papercutter, the inkpads and the stamps, and I’m all ready to head over, except that I can’t find the paper, which kind of renders the whole project moot.
Unfortunately, both my Wife and I have cleaned house since last I saw it. I fear that, as a result of the cleaning, the box of paper was moved from one place to another, and then from there back, and subsequently to a third place, unrelated to the other two, where it is currently resting.
Yes, I know, “A place for every thing and every thing in its place!” That’s great, I’m sure, but the problem isn’t so much that the thing is out of place as it is that I just don’t know where the place for the thing is.
I know exactly where it used to be.
Everyone I know has had that experience. It’s one of the most frustrating things in the world. You get used to something being somewhere, and that’s great, up until you move it to somewhere more “convenient.” I figure, if there’s some mad scientist out there working on a time travel device, the first incarnation will be a pair of gloves, possibly with a set of goggles, that will let the user simply reach back to a predetermined point in time and retrieve an item.
Not only would you be able to, say, retrieve your car keys off the corner of the dresser where you knew you placed them last night, you would have the added benefit of knowing that the reason they’re not there any more is because last night you put them in your pocket five minutes from now.
The only drawback would be using something like this to retrieve your watch. You’d have to keep re-setting it because it had skipped the time between when you put it down and when you reached back to pick it up again…
Update: The paper is found! And, indeed, it was something that had been moved once by each of us.