I have always been scornful of people who always seem to be losing their car-keys, house-keys, mobile phones, credit cards, wallets... that’s not for me.  I’m a creature of habit, and I’ve made a habit of knowing exactly where all these important things are at all times, never deviating from a set routine so that nasty surprises don’t happen.

I have made mistakes, of course:
  I once locked my car-keys inside the car, and my bike-keys under the seat of the bike, in both cases because I was carrying other things at the time and my routine was disturbed.  That involved getting the spare keys ( from a safe, predictable location, of course ) and resolving the problem.
  I once also thought that I had lost my credit card and was extremely annoyed about that, since I go to so much trouble to ensure that such events just don’t happen.  But, after I had canceled the card, of course, it turned up.  I had returned the card to my wallet as is my invariable routine, but had slid it into a different pocket by mistake, just not immediately visible.  Then, because it wasn't EXACTLY where it should be the next time I needed it, I just assumed that I had lost it.  D’Oh!

Today I took the bike into town to do some shopping, and re-deliver some incorrectly-addressed letters from my mail-box.  The under-seat storage on a TMax is not huge.  After stowing my crash helmet and gloves the bike seat was unusually hard to close, so I had to put down what I was carrying, open the seat and rearrange things, but no problem.  Shopping done, I returned to the bike to discover, to my horror, that I no longer had my bike-keys, which are deliberately on a separate key-ring from the car-keys.  But they hang from my right belt-loop EXACTLY the same way, and they just weren’t there!  The car-keys were, and I remembered how the bike seat had been hard to close... Aha!  I must have locked them under the seat.  I had rearranged contents around my crash helmet to allow the seat to close properly.  A break in my normal routine... that would be the cause, that’s happened before.  Just in case, though, I retraced my steps during my shopping trip, looking for the keys on the ground, but drew a complete blank.  I even went back to the supermarket and asked the checkout guy whether I had left them there, but he just stared at me like I was crazy, and denied having seen them.  Yep, they must be locked under the seat.

So, carrying my 10kg shopping bag, I walked home, slightly uphill all the way, about 2km.  There, I dug out the spare bike keys, jumped in the car and drove back into town.  Opening the bike seat I discovered that the keys were NOT there.  So, not locked under the seat and not visible along the path I took for shopping, so probably picked up by someone by now.

Drove back home to drop off the car, then walked all the way back into town again with the spare keys, there to discover the original set of keys on my LEFT belt-loop, right alongside the mobile phone pouch, and in plain view to anyone but me, because I would simply never look there – that’s not where they belong!  They had been there all the time.  What the hell are they doing there?!!

And thinking back on this... when I fronted the checkout at the IGA, the checkout guy would have looked at me and seen a dude with TWO sets of keys dangling from his belt.  What he said, though, was, ‘Nope, they’re not here, haven’t seen them.’  So this whole thing was his fault...  Definitely.  If this wasn’t Maleny, I’d be thinking of boycotting IGA!