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Mystery 'Lost' Items

I have lost A Sock.

It's a brand new sock, worn once. I intended to wear it again, as I'd only worn it briefly (with its partner) around the house. I took it (and its partner) off and they were left with the clothes I was going to wear on a small table outside the bathroom. Now it's gone. I've been giving the dog Big Significant Looks, but she's not really that sort of beast, and there's no trace of it.

I am now wearing odd socks.

I would go and count your teaspoons you will probably find you have an extra one now.

See my old post, below, from 2018 explaining why...


"Over many years I have become convinced that deep in their DNA, in their genome so to speak, both socks and tea spoons are inter-related at the quantum level.

It is a well known fact that if you put several pairs of socks in a confined space like a washing machine or a sock drawer for a period of time then one of the socks will vanish. I have a theory that your new teaspoons were in fact socks in a previous life and the vanishing socks are simply shape shifted in a separate quantum universe into tea spoons at which point they re-appear in this timeline but only when you are not looking.

To reference the reality of this concept you may be interested in researching the double slit experiment, here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment which proves that by simply observing something you can change its fundamental properties. This is why you will never actually see the tea spoons re-appear when you are looking as by looking you have changed the tea spoon's quantum reality into something else that is not capable of appearing until you cease looking.

The next time your teaspoon count changes I would immediately go and count your socks where I suspect you will find an opposing discrepancy in the sock drawer.

I once read a story about a single Roman chain mail sock that was found in a field and the article didn't mention tea spoons once which I took as proof of my hypothesis allowing me to promote it to "theory" status.

Whatever you do though don't put any tea spoons in your sock drawer as it has the potential to cause an imbalance in the fabric of the space/time continuum leaving you with an infinite number of tea spoons and no socks."
 
They aren't gnomes, or pixies, or Gremlins.

They're Boggarts, sometimes also referred to as Boggles. Same word.

The trick to getting stuff back when you've been Boggled or Boggarted is:

a) admit it's funny and have a laugh at the joke. Out loud. They like to be appreciated.

b) ask for the items to be returned.

it works more often than not, but only if you're nice.

Why does it work?
I don't know. It probably has something to do with giving your brain a break, diverting your attention from searching for whatever has gone walkabout and then opening your perceptions to seeing what's actually there.


Are you sure they aren't pixies.? I usually say "ok pixies I've lost xxxxx a little help please.." almost never fails..:)
 
Are you sure they aren't pixies.? I usually say "ok pixies I've lost xxxxx a little help please.." almost never fails..:)
You must have come across a family of helpful pixies. The ones in ours seem particularly indifferent, beligerent or both, when stuff goes missing.
 
Pixies require tempting onto the property, It's no good just letting them move around at random. I provided mine with a door for their sole use, it keeps them happy..


pixidoor-min.JPG
 
Do you give them porridge with butter?
 
Good lord no, they get small slivers of home cured ham..:dinner:
 
The little sods are on strike or holiday, I dropped a small pipe cleaning brush it hit the bookcase and now it's vanished. books checked behind and underneath clear . Gone......:dunno:
 
The little sods are on strike or holiday, I dropped a small pipe cleaning brush it hit the bookcase and now it's vanished. books checked behind and underneath clear . Gone......:dunno:
Glad to see they are self isolating as well.
 
My big tabby Zaphod once got a full size live rabbit through the cat flap unharmed.

We could only assume that he'd told it there was a party at ours and it came in voluntarily. There wasn't a mark on it and we caught it in the rubbish bin and released it in the field.
 
My big tabby Zaphod once got a full size live rabbit through the cat flap unharmed.

We could only assume that he'd told it there was a party at ours and it came in voluntarily. There wasn't a mark on it and we caught it in the rubbish bin and released it in the field.
It's possible the rabbit just got thru the flap - I found a racoon in my kitchen one night and I'm pretty sure the cat didn't bring it in. The cat was calmly watching the show.
 
My big tabby Zaphod once got a full size live rabbit through the cat flap unharmed.

We could only assume that he'd told it there was a party at ours and it came in voluntarily. There wasn't a mark on it and we caught it in the rubbish bin and released it in the field.
Years ago I had a small semi feral cat called Blackie, once on getting back from work the next door neighbor stopped me and told me he had to come into the garden to save a rabbet from Blackie, I said, " did he get it from the fields out back ? ", " no, he dragged it out of a rabbet hutch three doors down ", he told me, ( the rabbet was ok ). The same neighbor also had to save dogs from Blackie on two seperate occasions. The boy was fearless.
 
My big tabby Zaphod once got a full size live rabbit through the cat flap unharmed.

We could only assume that he'd told it there was a party at ours and it came in voluntarily. There wasn't a mark on it and we caught it in the rubbish bin and released it in the field.

We lost our 21 year old cat, Zak, a few weeks back. In his youth he was the king of hunters but his crowning achievement was to get a very large rabbit through the cat flap and into the kitchen. Unfortunately he removed the head to do so and left it on the mat outside.
 
We lost our 21 year old cat, Zak, a few weeks back. In his youth he was the king of hunters but his crowning achievement was to get a very large rabbit through the cat flap and into the kitchen. Unfortunately he removed the head to do so and left it on the mat outside.

My condolences on the loss of your Zak, Tempest63. Twenty-one is a great age for a cat. He sounds like quite a character! No doubt you have many fond memories of him.
:group:
 
I dont know if anyone else here has read the wonderful 'Raiders of the Lost Carpark' by the very fortean author Robert Rankin, he explaines where all the missing socks, teaspoons, pens etc go, according to the sprout master there are gaps in the world (he explains that if you take a world map and a sphere of the same scale and attemp to paste the map onto the sphere there will be gaps) these gaps are exploited by cabbies (for short cuts) and the gaps are revealed to them when they complete 'the knowledge'. In the book these gaps can be accessed by use of a magical ocarina, he also explains that small screws actually procreate, which is why you always have a small screw left over when you have reassembled a radio or other small electrical device you have been working on.
 
I dont know if anyone else here has read the wonderful 'Raiders of the Lost Carpark' by the very fortean author Robert Rankin, he explaines where all the missing socks, teaspoons, pens etc go, according to the sprout master there are gaps in the world (he explains that if you take a world map and a sphere of the same scale and attemp to paste the map onto the sphere there will be gaps) these gaps are exploited by cabbies (for short cuts) and the gaps are revealed to them when they complete 'the knowledge'. In the book these gaps can be accessed by use of a magical ocarina, he also explains that small screws actually procreate, which is why you always have a small screw left over when you have reassembled a radio or other small electrical device you have been working on.
Explains a lot that does.
 
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The little sods are on strike or holiday, I dropped a small pipe cleaning brush it hit the bookcase and now it's vanished. books checked behind and underneath clear . Gone......:dunno:
Does the brush have metal parts? We have those extending sticks with magnets on the ends for catching runaway metallic objects. Or any magnet taped to a coat hanger works too.
 
Douglas Adams has a similar theory about pens. Apparently they fall through wormholes to the Planet of Biros...

Incidentally, and somewhat spookily, I tried to open this page just now and most of the page was missing! A lost item among the lost items! I even took a picture because it was so apt...

(And yes, I know, it's my utterly shit internet connection, but, even so...)
FTpage.jpg
 
I have lost A Sock.

It's a brand new sock, worn once. I intended to wear it again, as I'd only worn it briefly (with its partner) around the house. I took it (and its partner) off and they were left with the clothes I was going to wear on a small table outside the bathroom. Now it's gone. I've been giving the dog Big Significant Looks, but she's not really that sort of beast, and there's no trace of it.

I am now wearing odd socks.
Did it turn up? Was it jammed in a jeans leg?

These days I have those nifty net bags for washing anything smaller than teeshirts. Foolproof. Everything goes into the bags as it comes off and isn't unpacked until it's back in my bedroom all clean and dry.

Techy sometimes doesn't bother so he still gets the missing socks.Technophobe.
 
Did it turn up? Was it jammed in a jeans leg?

These days I have those nifty net bags for washing anything smaller than teeshirts. Foolproof. Everything goes into the bags as it comes off and isn't unpacked until it's back in my bedroom all clean and dry.

Techy sometimes doesn't bother so he still gets the missing socks.Technophobe.
I think it turned up some weeks later, balled up and shoved into a random corner.

I am still giving the dog Big Looks...
 
Did it turn up? Was it jammed in a jeans leg?

These days I have those nifty net bags for washing anything smaller than teeshirts. Foolproof. Everything goes into the bags as it comes off and isn't unpacked until it's back in my bedroom all clean and dry.

Techy sometimes doesn't bother so he still gets the missing socks.Technophobe.
I have a foolproof way of making sure i never have odd socks, i only buy plain black ones, that way if one goes missing or gets a hole and has to be thrown i put the remainig sock in my draw until a similar incident happens and hey presto, i have a pair of socks again.
 
I have a foolproof way of making sure i never have odd socks, i only buy plain black ones, that way if one goes missing or gets a hole and has to be thrown i put the remainig sock in my draw until a similar incident happens and hey presto, i have a pair of socks again.
I had a job where black socks were worn and had many pairs. Unfortunately they were from different sources so didn't necessarily match. They looked similar but the fit varied, just enough to be noticeable to nobody except me.
 
I had a job where black socks were worn and had many pairs. Unfortunately they were from different sources so didn't necessarily match. They looked similar but the fit varied, just enough to be noticeable to nobody except me.
Yes, I have made this mistake before. 'Oh, I will only buy black socks from now on.' Two pairs from M&S, which look nothing like the pair from Primark, or the pair from Ted Baker and the four pairs from Debenhams are all different from each other... So you end up wearing one black sock and one 'black' sock. Even worse are the ones that look identical online when you order them but turn out to have some weird 'patterning' in the fabric, all different.

Which reminds me, my brother used to have socks that he called 'light black'. They were grey...
 
Techy sometimes doesn't bother so he still gets the missing socks.Technophobe.

I'm with Techy here! I bought some of those bags ages ago but decided they were more trouble than they were worth .... mainly because I've never been in a situation were it mattered whether or not my socks matched, my academically minded husband wouldn't notice whether or not his matched and my youngest son right from toddlerhood refused to were matching socks. I only had to be vigilant with my oldest sons socks and I just used to count them all in and count them all out ... (reverse) Brian Hanrahan style!

The bags are really useful for sorting fabrics that I am one of these days going to make into an award winning fabric hanging, so weren't a waste of money.

What I have however lost are my 'creative juices' but I console myself that whoever eventually gets the contents of my fabric cupboards will be overjoyed that I bought such wonderful fabrics and took such care to sort them! (I have to think that otherwise I'd cry.)

Sollywos x
 
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Yes, I have made this mistake before. 'Oh, I will only buy black socks from now on.' Two pairs from M&S, which look nothing like the pair from Primark, or the pair from Ted Baker and the four pairs from Debenhams are all different from each other... So you end up wearing one black sock and one 'black' sock. Even worse are the ones that look identical online when you order them but turn out to have some weird 'patterning' in the fabric, all different.

Which reminds me, my brother used to have socks that he called 'light black'. They were grey...
My youngest son never wears “a pair” of socks. They go in his sock drawer in singles and whatever he pulls out goes on.
I have a bit of OCD about socks, they have to be the same length etc etc etc. I could not wear mismatched socks. It would mess with my head all day long.
 
I would go and count your teaspoons you will probably find you have an extra one now.

See my old post, below, from 2018 explaining why...


"Over many years I have become convinced that deep in their DNA, in their genome so to speak, both socks and tea spoons are inter-related at the quantum level.

It is a well known fact that if you put several pairs of socks in a confined space like a washing machine or a sock drawer for a period of time then one of the socks will vanish. I have a theory that your new teaspoons were in fact socks in a previous life and the vanishing socks are simply shape shifted in a separate quantum universe into tea spoons at which point they re-appear in this timeline but only when you are not looking.

To reference the reality of this concept you may be interested in researching the double slit experiment, here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment which proves that by simply observing something you can change its fundamental properties. This is why you will never actually see the tea spoons re-appear when you are looking as by looking you have changed the tea spoon's quantum reality into something else that is not capable of appearing until you cease looking.

The next time your teaspoon count changes I would immediately go and count your socks where I suspect you will find an opposing discrepancy in the sock drawer.

I once read a story about a single Roman chain mail sock that was found in a field and the article didn't mention tea spoons once which I took as proof of my hypothesis allowing me to promote it to "theory" status.

Whatever you do though don't put any tea spoons in your sock drawer as it has the potential to cause an imbalance in the fabric of the space/time continuum leaving you with an infinite number of tea spoons and no socks."

The real answer might shock you - I've worked out what really happens to teaspoons!

https://forums.forteana.org/index.p...ting-mystery-of-teaspoons.64985/#post-1801312

...there's a creature that lives under the bath, behind the panel, that emerges at night and its diet consists of teaspoons, biros and single socks and the odd house key. The detritus that is found when one removes a bath panel is in fact the creature's excreta after eating said stuff.
 
I can't stand the feel of odd socks on my feet. And what a shame that black socks are not the answer. We have a chest where the top drawer houses a precious few matched socks. The drawer under that is a repository of unmatched mostly black socks, of varying lengths. thicknesses, toe and heel treatments, ankle cuffs; it just goes on and on in that drawer.
 
For years I have looked carefully at the sides of washers and dryers before carting away my laundry. No problems for YEARS! Then I moved, and found the washing machine in my building is a sock eater. I have been using lingere bags to protect my paired socks from this ogre of a washing machine. Everthing has been fine, until TODAY! I checked in my sheets, I checked in my clothes, no sock hidden through the magic of static electricity. Lost sock! This will trouble my nights . . . :pop:
 
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