The Lost

I lost a favorite book bag, last week. Actually, that's when I noticed it was missing. I actually lost it months ago during our recent move. I brought it to the new house, another damned Thing from the apartment, and casually, absently, placed it on top of a pile of boxes near the front of a closet.

If we had done a better job of un-packing, we would have had fewer boxes in front of, well, in front of everything, and I probably would have found it.

My first thought was that it was probably in "this" room. Then probably somewhere in "that" room. Then maybe it was out in the garage. I tried to place it within the apartment, and locate boxes of flotsam and jetsam from that strata, but didn't find it.

My first solution was to order another. It was a Lands' End Square-Rigger Canvas Attache Case, in Green, trimmed in leather. Beautifully made, sturdy, rugged. It was featured in full-page ads in Lands' End's catalogs for more than twenty years. I went to their Web site, but could not find it anywhere. I Googled "Lands' End Canvas Attache" which got me a skillion hits, most of which were product reviews saying how great the little case was. Finally, I found one article that talked about it in the past tense, saying Lands' End no longer offered it.

Well, that's just awful.

That would be like Dairy Queen deciding they could save money by not putting that little curl at the top of their ice cream cones. It would be like Gibson Guitars deciding they didn't need to make their Les Paul models, any more. It would be like Chevrolet deciding they could do without their Corvette. For a generation, the Land's End catalog talked about how great their knit golf shirts were, what made their Oxford office shirts so great, and how wonderful their Square-Rigger canvas attache cases were. In the early 1980s, they even modified the attache case so it could be used as a computer case, in a pinch.

I was crushed. I found one in Black, on eBay, and bid on it. A couple of hours later I had won it and it is now on its way to my house. So, of course, this morning I found my original Green one, the one I've owned for ten years, jammed between a couple of boxes near the closet in a room full of boxes.

There are lessons here.

Probably the first is that we've lived in this house for weeks, now and we should be done un-packing! The second is that we should be more deliberate in where we put things. Don't name a word processing document full of Web design ideas something that doesn't include the words "Web", "Design" and "Ideas" in the document name. And don't place it in a Folder named "General Stuff" or "Ideas to Work On" or something like that. That Folder should be named "Web Design Ideas".

I should have put my bag in a closet, or near my desk, where I could see it and remember it.

Oh, for Google, and for Spotlight on the Macintosh, which seemingly find anything, anywhere. Until there's a Google for the household, be more careful and plan accordingly.