When my wife noticed yesterday that I had emptied my wallet of its contents to let everything dry out, I told her it would be too embarrassing to tell her why.
"You dropped it in the toilet!?"
I replied with cunning, "I told you it would be too embarrassing to tell you."
I was fortunate that she thought I'd confirmed her toilet hypothesis, for what actually happened would have been far more embarrassing to talk about. I had left my wallet on the roof of my car Saturday afternoon and it had lain in 0.42 inches of rainfall that afternoon and night.
I know precisely how much rain it had withstood, for I finally figured out that I must have left the wallet on top of my car at Lowe's Home Improvement Center before going home and installing our new rain gauge....
Possibly even more embarrassing is that this was far from the first time I'd left something on top of my car, although it was the first time I'd left a wallet containing cash and IDs and credit cards....
I am so lucky that I have never removed the front-rack wind baffle that my daughter had on her Honda Accord before it passed to me about fifteen years ago. That wind baffle is great for keeping things from blowing off the top!
Haven't left anything on the car and driven off that I can remember.
ReplyDeleteBut FYI, before I leave my house I go through a 6-point checklist:
1. I remove my thumbnail disk storage unit containing all my computer stuff and put it around my neck on the attached lanyard. Been doing this ever since the fire in my neighborhood because of a friend who left to go shopping and returned to rubble and literally had nothing left of his life's accumulations except what was in his car.
2. Check to see that I have on my regular glasses, not my computer glasses.
3. Check that my iPhone is in my shirt pocket. I now wear only t-shirts with pockets.
4. Have my keys.
5. Have my wallet.
6. Have anything else related to the purpose of my foray into the real world; i.e., ski stuff, letters to be posted, whatever.
I can see that I need to have a checklist of some number of points myself! One of them seems to need to be to inspect the top of my car. And I often drive off from home without the shopping list I need....
ReplyDeleteWhere do you find T-shirts with pockets? I have the same problem with polo shirts....I stick everything into a pants pocket...
...or a jacket pocket, from one of which I recently seem to have lost my spectacles case containing my clip-on sunglasses—unless I'd left it on top of my car and the wind baffle didn't save it from blowing off, perhaps on the freeway? Hmm, I hadn't thought of the latter possibility but was rather thinking that it likely fell out of my jacket pocket.
I found pocket t-shirts on the internet and ordered two dozen.
ReplyDeleteOur cat was on the roof of our car one time years ago and I didn't know till I'd driven about 1 or so miles away. That scared me big time.
ReplyDeleteOoh, Dawn, yes indeed, my heart would have raced too!
ReplyDeleteAt least you didn’t lose all your ID’s etc…maybe you could qualify for the commercial where the lady leaves the diaper bag on top of her car!
ReplyDeleteI don’t think I’ve ever put something on top that I left there when I drove off, but since I’m getting old, maybe I’ve just forgotten about it all together.
Well, your luck appears to far exceed your embarrassment. If I had done this, my wallet would have fallen off on the street, persons would have used my credit card, my personal data would have been used to commit fraud, etc.
ReplyDeleteNo, I haven't done this, but I do misplace property from time to time—I've inadvertently left a hand pruner in the yard, misplaced an outdoor broom (thought it was lost when it was in another location and so I went out and bought another and now I have two), and other inanities too tedious to mention. The worst in this category was my cell phone. I hid it somewhere in the house when we went on a long trip two years ago and have never found it. (I'm convinced this was my subconscious brain at work; I like the occasional convenience of the damn things, but mostly loathe them as intrusive.)
I lost my sunglasses the day before I left for Germany and by the time I got back they were long gone from wherever I left them. I RARELY lose things, which I attribute to routines, as Jim describes, and mindfullness. "being in the now" helps tremendously, if you can step back long enough from the mayhem that is life to do it.
ReplyDelete