A year ago, Joan and I pooled our savings and bought ourselves a new car. We had been driving our old car for 13 years and found ourselves fairly overwhelmed by all the new technology that we found on our new vehicle. A lot of that new technology, we have not yet figured out.
One of the new things that confronted us was keyless entry and starting, that the car featured. It sounded easy enough, instead of using a key, you just carried around a fob (thats the big black thing in the photo). As long as you have that on your person, you can open the locked doors just by touching the door handle, or start the car by pressing a button on the dashboard.
I soon discovered that all this ease of use also caused some problems. For all of my adult life I have been carrying my car and house keys in my pant’s pocket, and as a result, I always knew where they were. Only days after purchasing our new car, we were at a New Year’s Eve party at a friend’s house and I sat down by the bay window of their house and stole a glance at our new car parked outside. To my puzzlement and dismay I discovered that it was parked there with it’s back hatch wide open.
I soon figured out what had happened. When I sat down with the fob in my pocket, the pressure and movement of my pants and leg caused one of the buttons on the fob to open the back hatch. Throughout the year similar things happened as I sat on the bench by our carport door to put on my shoes. The fob would cause the car doors to lock, the horn to blow, or the back hatch to open.
This was not a good thing, so I decided I would no longer carry the keys in my pant’s pocket, but instead keep them on the kitchen counter. I tried this for a while and then a few days ago, that caused a problem.
Joan had taken the car to town to go to her knitting group, and when I got done paintings, I decided to use the truck to take a picture frame into town get it repaired. I carried it to the truck and put it in the back, I let Skye into the cab, then got into the driver’s seat, reached into my pocket to get my keys, and discovered it wasn’t there.
“Damn,” I said to myself.
I walked back into the house, took off my boots, and walked into the kitchen to get my keys. I was surprised when I couldn’t see it on the kitchen counter. Maybe it was in my room in some other pants. I walked up there found my work pants, but the pockets were empty. I was now really confused, where could my key be.
I looked a every possible location where the keys could be and found nothing. Finally in desperation, I called Joan’s cell to see if she had any ideas. At first she was also puzzled, but then she checked in her purse and discovered that my keys, along with her keys, were there--she had mistakenly picked up my keys from the counter and driven away.
This of course, gave me a bit of a leg up over Joan.
Then a couple of days later, I was up paintings and Joan was ready to drive into town. I could hear her shuffling around and asked what was wrong. She told me she couldn’t find her keys. This is a common problem for her, so much so that one Christmas I bought her a “Tile” (the white plastic square in the photo). It is a gadget that you can attach it to something you often misplace, if you can’t find it, you can press an app on your cell phone and this will cause the tile to make a chiming sound so you can locate it.
Joan got her phone and pressed the app. I could hear the chiming sound, but she was downstairs, walking around unable to locate where it was coming from. I joined the search and went downstairs to help, but I couldn’t hear the sound down there. I went back upstairs and followed the sound and located Joan’s keys in my pant’s pocket, where I guess I had mistakenly put them.
My misstep had caused me to lost my leg up advantage I had on Joan and I have decided to go back to keeping my keys in my pants pocket.
