Discussion: Car keys...

There are those who occasionally eventually find their glasses on their head. I used to hide my car keys behind a log or under leaves etc at parking, occasionally w/o making firm mental note. I once spent some 45' at Harriman turning everything over, increasingly frantic. The mind was somewhere else. As to yours, look in your back pocket. It may be closer than you think.

He checked his back pocket numerous times.

What worked was the technique of trying to get in touch with AAA. Sketchy phone connection, difficulty with their technique of sending a link to a page that's supposed to figure out your location, etc. and once they got that to work, the keys rematerialized out of hammerspace.

Read Bob's last three sentences. He's clearly focused on what I was focused on, while I couldn't find my keys, what I had actually lost was my mind.

A long time ago there used to be a sign on the wall at Hamilton Newell's -- "Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most." So true. The keys? There's always a hardware store (or AAA).

Ah, your mind was in your back pocket! Got it!

Still, the technique worked. Surprisingly well, since typically the keys wouldn't have appeared until AAA showed up.

I lost my rental car keys at some meet in the midwest a few years ago. Same feeling, got Ken Sr. to call AAA for me, just couldn't imagine what had happened. Turned out it was so windy that the keys had blown off the top of the tire and landed directly behind it where they were really hard to find or reach.

We've taken to (sometimes) leaving rental car keys with results crew people when the parking lot seems sketchy or we're unsure who will finish first. Just pick them up when you download your punch (or check in at finish, whichever is applicable).

I guess I've had so many decades of occasionally putting something down while being primarily focused on some other activity and then having had no real recollection of it a few hours later that I don't regard the persistence of that behavior as any symptom of senility. I think my most annoying experience of that sort with car keys was maybe about 45 years ago when a grad student walked into my office and asked if he could borrow my key to get into the student shop for a few minutes because he had inadvertently left his at home that morning. I handed him my key ring, which also had the car key on it, and told him to bring it back when he was done. I noticed the absence of my keys a few hours later when I walked off the 3/4 of a mile to the peripheral parking lot where my car was parked, reached into my pocket and found no keys. Grumbling to myself, I walked back to the office and spent half an hour or 45 minutes looking first around my desk, then all the places I could remember having worked on things around the lab, before eventually remembering the loan. A quick trip to the student shop showed no lights on and nobody there, but fortunately the student came back after dinner to continue work in the lab, so I was saved the 9-mile jog home. The student was at least embarrassed and apologetic afterwards!

One of my best car key experiences was losing my keys at Pawtuckaway and then schlepping back to NYC to retrieve spares before taking plains, trains, and automobiles, including a sojourn at UNH, to retrieve the car before the local constabulary established a crime scene on Monday morning. Good times!

The keys worked through the seam in the pocket of my O pants. The only time that’s happened.

That's why I never take keys out in the woods with me. Or hang gliding.

PG, a phd may be in order, then no-one would bat an eyelid at mislaid keys.

Oh man, I remember j-man's glorious quest to retrieve the keys. I believe there was a part that involved Ross being convinced to wade through a swamp in a fruitless search for them.

I remember a wade/swim in an Everglades NP waterway in a fruitless search for several things...