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Friday, January 20, 2012

The key is to stop losing the danged keys

My wife is an amazing person.
She is one of the smartest, strongest people I know. She has been a nurse for more than 23 years, an incredible mother to our three children and there is nothing she can’t do.
Actually, she cannot reach the top shelf because she is five feet tall. I am 6’4” tall, which proves God is a funny guy with a nutty sense of humour.
She also has a hard time changing light bulbs, for obvious reasons. OK, there is nothing she can’t do as long as it does not involve reaching for anything too high up.
But other than being vertically challenged, she is the most capable person I have ever known. But she does have one fly in the near perfect ointment.
One white whale, one recurring problem that has been plaguing her since the dawn of time: she is constantly losing her keys.
And when I say constantly, I don’t mean once in awhile she will ask, “Now where did I put those darn keys.”
I am talking about three, four (or more) times in a single week she will misplace her keys, which is hard to do because she has more keys than a piano, all bound together with mountain climbing apparatus that weighs in at 14 pounds.
Her key chain is so large the van tilts to one side whenever they are in the ignition.
But she still manages to ‘misplace’ them roughly 400 times a year. I am not exaggerating here either. Hardly a day goes by where she does not spend time looking for the danged things.
I even bought her this little device that you attach to your keys and when you whistle it makes a noise so you can find them.
Problem solved.
Nope.
Just about every sound would set off the little device and it proved too annoying to employ, so it was back to the near daily have-you-seen-my-keys routine.
There are many variations of the request for help to locate the keys, but they all boil down to five words: “I cannot find my keys.”
Her latest crisis involved a new twist on the key situation. She did not lose all of her keys this time, only part of them. She called me a work to tell me she lost the car keys, but still had the van keys.
It would appear the keys have adopted a divide-and-conquer strategy.
In a mild panic, she relayed the story of how the car keys must have fallen off the massive key chain she lugs around. She called all of her friends and the stores she visited that day, but remained keyless.
Usually when she loses a set of keys, it is in the family homestead so the search area is not too large. This time however, she lost them somewhere on planet Earth which will make the search considerably more challenging.
I am not sure why she has such a difficult time keeping track of her keys, especially at home: walk in the door, put them on the hook next to the door and the next time you need them – Tadaaaaaaa there they are, right where you left them.
But more often than not she is left scrambling around the house searching for the elusive pieces of metal.
She always finds them. Sometimes they fell off the hook and are on the floor. Fair enough, that can happen to the best of us. It is when they end up in the basement, bedroom, bathroom or the back deck that the search is most intense.
Other times she will find them in the pocket of a jacket she wore earlier in the day or perhaps she threw them in her purse (which usually sits next to the hook.)
But like I said, she is a very smart person who has been trusted with people’s lives for more than two decades.
Just don’t trust her with your keys.

1 comment:

Karen Bouchard said...

Oh, too funny! I however have a husband who misplaces keys. It's not so funny when he does it ... but it's probably not 400 times a year.