The Epic Search For The Lost Keys

Lost Keys

Five months ago I lost my car keys. In my attempts to find them I searched every corner of our apartment. I looked through every draw, checked every coat pocket, emptied every bag but found nothing.

Luckily my wife still had her car keys so started ‘borrowing’ them whenever I needed to go somewhere. She would use these opportunities to impress upon me the importance of finding my own car keys… So I would start my search again.

I interrogated our two year old daughter for information. When that failed I resorted to giving her another set of keys in the hopes that she would lead me to her secret hiding place and my missing car keys. Alas, she was innocent.

Then I became convinced that my car keys were in England. It wasn’t a complete stretch of the imagination. They had gone missing around the time we had visited my parents in London. In fact, my wife had driven us back to the boat with her own car keys. I’d not seen mine since the trip.

I asked my parents to search their home on four separate occasions over the months that followed. I asked them to check under the furniture. I asked them to search the street where we’d parked our car. I asked them to search their entire house from to bottom. Each time they found nothing and asked me to stop harassing them.

But I was convinced that my car keys had to be at my parents’ house or (at the very least) somewhere in England. Maybe I would just have to have a look for myself during our next visit.

More time passed. Life suddenly became very busy so we did not get a chance to return to England and start my search operation. I slowly started to realize that my car keys were probably lost forever and that I might have to get some new ones at some point. However, since I was not quite ready to admit that yet I continued using my wife’s car keys instead.

Five months had passed since my search began.

Then one day I was on my way out somewhere as my wife came in from cleaning the car. I asked to borrow her car keys again as I had done many times before and she responded by dangling a set of keys in front of my face. But when I tried to take them she refused to hand them over. I was puzzled. Was she trying to make a point about finding my own car keys? Did she want a kiss first (which I tried to do but was met with a head shake)? Why did she keep waving the keys and giving me that funny look?

It took me almost a minute to realize what was going on. The car keys she was holding were not hers… They were mine.

She had just found my missing car keys… in the car… under the driver’s seat. I quickly phoned my parents and apologized.

Stuart

Stuart is an accident prone Englishman who has been living in the Netherlands since 2001. Even his move to the country was an unintentional accident, the result of replying to a cryptic job advertisement he found one day in a local British magazine. Since then he has learned to love the Dutch (so much so that he married one of them) and now calls the country home. He started the blog Invading Holland in 2006 as a place to share his strange stories of language misunderstandings, cultural confusions and his own accident prone nature.

6 Responses

  1. Gez says:

    I think the only word suitable here is
    “D’oh!”

    But at least you have them back :)

  2. What an utterly British ending to this epic quest, and I apologize for it. :P (Funny how things turn up when you stop looking for them…)

  3. Face the uncomfortable truth (and I speak as a convicted idiot-felon), you’re an idiot.

  4. AQK1982 says:

    Juist……. dus…… at least you (she) found them in the end :-)

  5. dragonlady says:

    Now we can get the house straight again.

  6. I had a similar situation once a few years back – when I got home, I took my jacket off and didn’t notice that my office key fell out of my pocket. Normally I would have heard the clanging as it hit the floor but the key fell into one of my ex-girlfriend’s shoes instead. It was weeks before she used that specific shoe and before I (she) found it.

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