I don’t get mail delivered to my house. Instead, my street has a cluster of locked mailboxes in a stand in the middle of the street. If. package is too big for our box, the carrier delivers it to our door. Everything else – junk mail, bills and occasional letters – gets stuffed into our individual locked boxes.
When I bought my house, I was given on mailbox key. A few weeks later, I could’t find my key. I searched my pockets and checked the usual places I could have put it. After a few days, I googled and learned I could request a new key or a new lock from USPS and that it would be $20 and would take at least a few days.
Then I found my key which had fallen underneath a table near where I hang it.
The next day, I took the key to my local Ace Hardware store and got a duplicate made for $3.25, just in case.
In the 5 years since then, I’ve occasionally misplaced my key in a pocket or had it fall under a piece of furniture, but I’ve never not found it within a day.
At least, that was the case until this month.
Somehow, I lost my key.
It didn’t show up when I vacuumed and mopped the entire house. I checked under all the furniture cushions. I looked through every pocket in all of my pants and jackets. I checked under furniture, behind doors and in places I’d never put it just in case I might have inadvertently set it down because my hands were full.
I even retraced my steps when I walked the dogs the previous day in case I somehow dropped it during our walk.
I never found it.
Luckily, I knew exactly where I keep my spare key. I used it that day and got another duplicate made the following morning.
When I think about how many hours I’ve wasted throughout my life looking for misplaced keys, I want to smack myself in the head. For somewhere between $.99 and $.3.25, I could have eliminated that problem entirely from my life. As a matter of fact for at least the past 20 years, I have. I wish I had thought to do this 30 years before that.