Now where did I put my …?

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor L ike Liam Neeson’s character in the “Taken” series of movies, I, too have a particular set of skills. Unfortunately, my “skill” involves being able to needlessly complicate even the simplest of matters.

Now, I’m not talking about major mishaps here (usually), but rather the ability to always be able to suffer minor inconveniences that really don’t impact anything, but man are they annoying.

My current “favorite” is forgetting where my glasses are. I don’t really need them for day-to-day stuff, but I definitely need them when I’m on my computer. Since I mostly work from home, I transition from wearing glasses to not wearing glasses several times throughout the day.

Only some little gremlin has been waiting for me to take them off so he can hide them. That’s really the only explanation I have for it, because they never seem to be where I left them. The little sucker also seems to enjoy doing the same thing with my keys, which is a whole different set of issues.

It’s just little things like that that are really amplified by the fact that we’re all stuck in our house. The remote control is another one of those things. Or I guess to be completely accurate, I should say “remote controls” because there’s the one that controls the TV, one that works the cable box, and one that works the streaming device, and they are never – and I do mean never – where they should be. I find them under the couch, in the couch and under the end tables, which while inconvenient, at least makes sense. But I also have recently found a remote control in the bathroom, in the kitchen sink, in the laundry room, and my personal favorite, sitting the front seat of my wife’s SUV. What … the … crap?

I’d blame my grandson but he’s only been mobile for a few months and this has been happening my whole life …

But my proclivity to endure minor annoyances doesn’t stop there. I am the perfect height so that my pants pockets always catch on the knobs on our kitchen cabinets. I have a burner on my gas stove at home that lights for everyone in the world but me. I have a pothole on my street that literally only affects me and my family, because we’re the very last house on the street. If I need to use my water hose, it will definitely get kinked up, and don’t even get me started on my extension cord, which can somehow get tangled up in a Gordian knot even if I roll it up and hang it with a zip tie.

Again, none of these are huge deals, but I just always manage to have that one little thing go wrong when I’m doing something … a cord that’s two inches two short, a shoe whose mate is inexplicably not in the closet, a forgotten (but vital) ingredient after a marathon trip to the store. I’ve currently got a 24-pack of hot dogs in the fridge with no hot dog buns and several boxes of cereal but no milk.

My all-time favorite one of these kinds of deals is from 20 or so years ago, when my wife was on her way home from the store. About a block from our apartment at the time, she had a blowout. She was worried about driving the rest of the way home on a flat, so she pulled into the Sonic parking lot in Marion and walked the rest of the way home. It wasn’t far.

When she got there, she told me about it (this was way before we had cell phones) and I told her I’d go fix it. She said she had thought about fixing it herself, but could not find the jack and the tire tool. I told her they were in a weird little hidey-hole in the trunk and I would take care of it.

I asked her for the keys. She had no keys. She insisted she had not left them in the car because she had used them to open the trunk. Frustrated, I decided she must have left them in the trunk’s keyhole, so I hoofed it over to Sonic. She had not left them there – she had locked the doors to the car, so I couldn’t look there either.

It turned out, she had actually locked the keys inside the trunk, which was only accessible on her 1989 Buick Skylark by, you guessed it … using the key … of which we had only one. We eventually had to get my Dad to come with a screwdriver and pop the lock, and sure enough, there on the spare tire was my wife’s keys.

The rest of the time we had that car, we had to use a screwdriver to open the trunk. Again, not a major inconvenience, but a minor annoyance that I seem to be “gifted” at having encounters with. Speaking of which … where is my cell phone? It was RIGHT HERE!