When me and my sisters were little, we were “latchkey kids”. Does anyone remember that term? There were times that we had people at home, like my grandmother, aunts or uncles that lived with us, but we always had keys to get into the house, just in case no one was home.

As a kid, I was pretty irresponsible, and I lost EVERYTHING. Especially my house keys. It got to the point where my father gave me a HUGE keychain. You know how doctor’s offices use those big ass paddles to hold their bathroom keys? That was pretty similar to the one my dad put on my house keys. He wanted to make it big enough so I didn’t lose it. Even with that, I still lost those keys once or twice.

I had flashbacks to my youth this week, after I had lost my work keys. Even though I work at home, I’ve got a keychain that holds luggage keys and a little electronic code generator that I need to log onto our network VPN (don’t bother stealing it - you need the code AND my secret pin to log in). I can work just fine outside of our network, but if I want to use outlook or our company’s intranet sites, I have to be logged in. I am constantly misplacing my keys, usually finding them stuck inside or under the couch. However, in the last weeks, these keys have been MIA. I was a little worried that they could have been packed away somewhere while we were getting ready for an open house, or even worse, that Ben could have thrown them in the garbage (which he NEVER does, but who knows that that kid does when I’m not looking?). Usually when I’m done using my keys, I through them in my backpack, but I digged through the 200 pockets in my bag and didn’t see them. I was starting to get worried since I needed to log into request time off for the comic convention.

Finally, after ransacking the whole house, I decided to empty out my backpack. I know that I said that I had digged through my backpack, but to tell the truth, there’s a lot of crap in there. I’ve got tons of pens, a graphic tablet, mouse and stylus, a flask shaped external hard drive w/usb cable, a USB cable for my camera, nail cutter, 2 sets of ear buds, 2 packages of thank you cards i’ve never sent out (so if you gave Ben a gift for his birthday, THANKS!), a camera filter, a couple flash drives, old CDs, loose change, papers, envelopes, and loads of other junk. There was a chance that in the 30 times that I had checked my backpack, that I had missed it.

So I started taking things out, and discovered, in pocket #153, my keys. They had been in there the whole time. Argh!

Maybe I need to ask my dad if he has an extra paddle-sized keychain that he can lend me…

Tags: Memories, Stories //