Lileks: Key facts about losing things

After the latest Apple product announcement, someone in the tech press complained that the AirTags didn't have Family Sharing. I know that's bothered you, too.

What am I talking about? Little disks you can attach to things, like keys, a purse, a backpack. If you get too far away from the item, your phone buzzes and sends a message that you're no longer near your item. If you ever wanted a backpack with separation anxiety, these are for you.

I didn't put one on my keys, because I never lose my keys.

Update: I have lost my keys. OK, don't say it. Do not tell me they're in the last place I put them.

That's not always true. My wife couldn't find her keys recently. Eventually we found them in one of her shoes. Either they'd been on the counter, and someone knocked them off, or the dog got up on the counter and nosed them into her shoe, because he didn't want anyone to leave the house. In any case, her shoes were not the last place she put her keys.

There are five phases to finding lost keys.

Phase 1 is based on the Breezy Certainty of the Pants Pockets Likelihood. What was I wearing when I came home? Pants, right? Hope so. So, let's check the pants I think I was wearing yesterday ... drat. Maybe I was wearing these pants? Additional drat. These pants? Compounded drat.

Twenty minutes later, you're getting the tuxedo you wore on your wedding day out of a back closet and patting the pockets. They're sewed shut. Maybe you should get a knife and open them, just to make sure.

Phase 2: Retracing your steps. The last time I had them, I was bringing home some takeout Thai food. When I arrived with the food, I went from garage to kitchen, never pausing — or, did I stop with a bag of hot food and say, "I think I should tinker in the boiler room awhile and perhaps co-mingle my keys with the contents of this drawer of loose nuts, twist-ties, unused door stoppers and other bits of domestic detritus that will probably outlive me"? No, I went straight to the kitchen, and the keys always go in the drawer.

Except they didn't. So, here you start to pace the house like Hercule Poirot, frowning, inspecting the smallest thing, re-creating the events of the previous night.

And what had I done? I had cleaned out the medicine drawer to get rid of expired over-the-counter medicines. You know, you get in one of those moods where you feel on top of absolutely nothing, it's all a shambles, really, a miracle that you make it to the end of the day, but you certainly can do something about that Nyquil that might have lost its potency.

Could the keys have been thrown out during this mad farrago? Did I think, "Oh, look, my keys are still in my pocket. I'd best place them in this plastic bin full of toothbrushes we got from the dentist but never use in case someday we're out of toothbrushes." This, I am certain, did not happen, but until I go through the bin, I'm not sure.

"Why don't you just use your spare?" my wife asks as I am shining a flashlight into the back of a drawer where we keep the holiday candles and napkin rings.

"No! Then I'll accept what happened. I'll never find them. The minute you use your spare, a rip in the fabric of the universe opens and the originals are sucked into another dimension."

"Have you looked in the other dimension?"

"What am I, Stephen Hawking? Do I look like someone who can easily access a theoretical realm?"

The next stage is the worst, really. Phase 4: going through the garbage. Maybe they got swept up in the post-Thai meal cleaning. So I poke through the stratified layers, thick with coffee grounds, thinking, "If I write about this I'll get angry letters from strangers for not composting the coffee grounds. What an odd life."

Phase 5: side-eye at your partner. Did you take my keys? I say that with love. Deep suspicion and paranoia also, but mostly love. Of course, they say no, like any guilty person. I go through her purse, which contains 473 items that are Not Keys At All.

At this point I got a text from the friend I was supposed to meet, asking if I was ever coming.

"Be right there after I do a seance and Ouija board."