Wednesday, January 10, 2018

Andrew's hide and seek adventure

Originally envisioned as a tweetstorm, hence the abbreviations:

So, walking home from a late workout, the wind tunnel just by the athletic club did its thing. My glasses flew off. I saw them, then I didn't, and I hoped they didn't fall through the manhole. I didn't have my phone for a flashlight either.

Not the first time. Then, they flew the other way & it was daylight. But a passerby helped for a while with his own flashlight. I figured the approximate trajectory & noticed a Divvy bikerack sort of blocked the wind.

Went home&got my phone. Bicyclist stopped/helped a bit. I thanked him too. Went home again & got paper to write lost and found info & tape for a pole I found. Wished for a (otherwise loathsome) selfie stick to help look in dark places/keep the light close to the ground.

Watched trash blow by for more data. Then a weird clattering noise. More plastic? No, my glasses, right where someone had tried to release a Divvy bike & couldn't. I'd sworn I was standing there talking to them. But it was in the center of the trajectory lines I guessed.

I had a lot of duplicated effort but I'm proud of not panicing too much & observing what I could. Whatever journey my glasses took (80 feet maybe) I ... tried enough to give myself a good chance to get lucky.

90 mins to save glasses that cost well into 3 digits. That's a good bit of work (& more exercise than I planned!) But I still need to buy a backup pair for next time. And I wish I had gotten the passerbys' mail to say thanks.

I feel smarter about this than the time I dropped my keys in the dumpster while taking the trash, because 1) holding the trash and the keys in the same hand (and not taking 2sec to put the keys away) was ASKING for it 2) there was a lot more ground to cover than the dumpster.