Do you know how in some restaurants and stores the bathroom key is attached to a large and brightly-colored piece of wood or plastic? Or something bulky and unmistakable that can't possibly fit in your pocket or comfortably blend in with your personal items, should you absent-mindedly forget you have it with you?
I think about this a lot, with regards to the items I frequently lose. In the case of a bathroom key, the worst-case scenario would be the inconvenience of making a duplicate and knowing some stranger has unmitigated access to your toilet. Actually I guess it would be worse if that key were the only one, but even still, changing a lock isn't the biggest trauma in the grand scheme of things.
Why, then, are indispensably important items like, say, my passport, so incredibly easy - effortless really - to lose? Wouldn't you think that for a document so important that one cannot legally leave the country without it, they would at least make it larger than a postcard? I mean, my birth certificate is a solid half sheet, but I would not object to a neon pink A4 sized passport if it meant I were less likely to bury it on my desk or carelessly jam it in a pocket.
To be perfectly honest, I'd be on board with a giant foam finger emblazoned with stars and eagles that plays chants of "USA! USA!" if I said the right combination of words while searching for it. At least that way, it's more likely to double as a pillow than scrap paper in my purse, and I can't imagine misplacing it.
"Sweetie, have you seen my passport?"
"What does it look like?"
"Umm, the giant orange finger?"
"Oh right, I saw that in the kitchen cabinet next to the wine glasses."
I'd also consider something inflatable that could be compressed for actual travel, a buoy as it were, to guide my passport through the torrential sea of clutter that my life most frequently resembles. Some chimes and flashing LEDs wouldn't hurt.
For someone who has carefully kept track of every scrap of paper I've ever written on, every printed item ever deposited in my campus mailbox, and scads of useless and embarrassingly trivial ephemera, I have a real knack for hopelessly losing my passport just before every major trip.
Obviously today was no exception. I joked with my mother that I really ought to find it (seeing as I am leaving for New Jersey and then Italy in like a day and a half), and I was almost certain that it was located in the enormous cardboard box full of bills and very important papers that I've been using as a bedside stand since January. Yes, you read that correctly and no, I don't think it's time for an organization intervention. Yet.
To assuage my increasing anxiety, I figured it would probably be best to confirm this suspicion and actually get my passport in my hands since that and my ticket are the two genuinely indispensable items for impending international travel. I started digging, chuckling to myself as I found the e-tickets and boarding passes from every flight I've taken since 2006. I grimaced a bit when I triumphantly laid smug hands on my impossible-to-lose lime green passport-holder and ticket organizer, only to find it empty save for an expired MetroCard (which I distinctly remember loading with $20 last summer and never using, ouch).
I came to the bottom of this enormous box with no passport, and I started to actually worry. I thought back on the last time I had my passport on my person, thinking it was Toronto in September... no wait, I kept zipping it in and out of a down vest pocket on the way to Hawaii in January!
I searched my vests and jackets, every handbag, suitcase and pocket I could find. I rummaged through the piles on my desk, clearing down to the surface and thinking now would be a great time to have implemented an invention I came up with in high school (little electronic LED and sound things that you attach to frequently-lost items like wallets, keys and TV remotes, which could be paged from a wall-mounted unit the way I could page my cordless phone from its base).
Just as I was beginning to get genuinely panicky, chiding myself for my carelessness, facing the possibility of having to skip a month-long trip to Italy because I'm such a damn slob, and working out the details of rushing somewhere in Manhattan with my birth certificate and fistfuls of cash, I had a flash of intelligence. "Maybe it's in the important desk?"
Yeah, I have a second desk that I only use for daily important things like stamps and envelopes, our laundry card, my checkbook and so on. I had rifled through it before starting the passport search, but I only looked in its right-hand nook, where other card and document-looking things were kept.
With trembling hands, I went back to this desk and moved a stack of library books an inch away from the left-hand nook. Duh, there was my passport, on top and safe. It almost looked like a responsible person had put it there.
I'm willing to place odds that I will forget to bring underwear on this trip.
