Encyclopedia Brown and the case of the missing keys

There is, perhaps, nothing more frustrating than losing your personal objects in a small confined space. Whether it is your keys, phone, or wallet your entire life comes to a screeching halt as you attempt to remedy the situation. Compounding the frustration of losing some of the most important information of your life (let’s face it, a person without a driver’s license or cell phone isn’t human), one has only a small list of possibilities to scour before you are faced with a question older then humanity itself:

WHERE THE FUCK DID THAT GO?

This is simply frustrating because all people are endowed with the idea of the “conservation of matter”, and once the search has called off we are left with a logical paradox. All the knowledge and facts of the physical universe tell us it should be here, and yet it is not.

I have the perfect example of this, my father. Many years ago, my father lost his wallet. After several days of frantically searching the house, retracing his steps, and interrogating everyone one of his family members, he became convinced that his wallet was errantly placed in a waste bin and thrown out with the trash. We can probably all see where this is going, can’t we? Eventually he enlisted all of us to go down to the dump and dig. Lucky for us, the people who managed the N city dump had kept meticulous records on where each garbage truck dumped its load and we managed to find our own personal garbage.

The wallet was not found despite finding everything else possible in the dump*. We headed back home, defeated.

The wallet was found a day or so later, by the trash can.

I have no doubt that my dad looked everywhere in the house, and scanned by the trash can several hundred times before he decided to haul his beloved family out to the dump. Nor do I doubt that my Dad is far smarter than I. I can only believe that he had fallen under the same stressful spell that is innate in all of humanity when small important things go missing.

* I had no idea people would ever throw out a dead dog in a plastic bag