Lost and Found

I lose things. I am absent-minded. Things I own just plain disappear, without warning, rhyme, reason or explanation – whompf! – they’re gone. Clean fucked off. I cannot understand it or predict what will be next, and I can explain it only marginally more adroitly than I can, say, particle physics, or the success of Two Door Cinema Club.

This week’s near-vital missing item is a pen. Not just any pen, this – a fine, balanced and moreover entirely free fountain pen of the house of Waterman, procured through the labyrinthine means of the work stationary catalogue (more on this dastardly and infernal tome later).

The writing implement in question’s lines and the smooth flow of ink issuing from it have - I’ve assured thrilled onlookers - led to better, more considered note-taking on my part, and in short, an upswing in my performance at work. By association, I have gained confidence in a variety of areas of life, and now leap as sure-footedly as a mountain goat from one challenge to the next, guided by the certain knowledge that I will succeed. Yup, my posh new pen’s made the world a better place for everybody. It’s a joy to behold, literally. Until this morning’s arrival at the Citadel of Relentless Opportunity was overshadowed by ill tidings and a development that cast a great pall over our team’s early wisecracking; a black mood leavened only slightly by the news that the Bank Holiday was next week: The Pen, that shining example to us all, had gone missing.

Aghast, I rooted through my rucksack, palms slick with perspiration at the thought of The Pen’s horrendous demise on the floor of the 0804 from Loughborough Junction. Perhaps it had fallen and choked to death in the shifting, foot-thick silt of receipts and business cards that dominate the bottom of this, the world’s least tidy work bag? Worse still, what if a long-forgotten sandwich remnant, lurking Kraken-esque in the bag’s inky depths, had slathered it in a nib-rotting hummus-and-tobacco-flake bisque – a fate that had already befallen an iPod in similarly tragic circumstances last year? I almost had to call off the search as a horrific slideshow of images flashed through my mind’s eye, featuring The Pen coming to grief under the relentless tide of commuters trampling past Farringdon station.

I looked everywhere, short of actually pacing maniacally back to Farringdon, as after all a pen’s a pen, even if it is The Pen. After a few minutes, my years of training in second-guessing and then outwitting my past self kicked in: ‘Think how you’d think in this situation’, I told myself, confusingly: ‘then do something unexpected and totally without precedent, because that’s probably what you did with it in the first place.’ It didn’t work. I tried looking for The Pen in my bag, my jacket, the lining of my jacket – see, told you I’m a pro – under my chair, under my desk, under my pedestal drawers thing under my desk, under colleagues’ desks – but to no avail. The Pen remained resolutely unfound.

Disconsolate, and sensing the familiar escalation to full-on rage that frequently accompanies situations like this, I looked down at the alternatives to my new and favourite note-taking device. The various desk-tidies were billets to quite the scrawniest, half-chewed and decidedly motley selection of writing implements I’ve seen in a good while. A sorry company of fading highlighters, biros with blobs of ink drying embarrassingly in their fuselages, blunt pencils and something that looked like it had last seen action a Ladbrokes stockroom in 1987 were all I had to work with. To get through the day using this past-it collection would have been depressing in the extreme, and there would have been casualties for sure. Old Timer Biro, whose clicky button hasn’t worked this side of 9/11, and can’t do a lower-case j without weeping stodgy black crud until halfway through the next word would never make it to lunch, let alone my three-thirty with the chatty bloke and his lazy eye from Accounts. It would have been carnage – like sending Manfred Mann over the top at Ypres.

As it turned out, my meetings were cancelled, so I was able to confine the Clive Dunn of the rollerball world and his similarly antiquated cohorts to barracks for the rest of the day, but still mystery shrouded the exact location of The Pen – in so many ways, the Enterprise-D to their Model-T Ford.

The good news for me, though, is that technology – or rather, some young and well-funded creative thinkers with great hair, doubtless based in California – have provided an answer of sorts. Tile, a product small enough to fit on a keyring, has been launched through the crowdfunding site Kickstarter, and has already secured a quite absurd amount of funding. Why? Well, in short, Tiles find things for you.

I am not the most technologically-minded person in the world, but by my reckoning, Tiles are little RFID tags that you stick onto your treasured possessions and then track them, using some sort of tidily-appointed mobile app or other. As you can tell, my research into this is at this stage pretty minimal, but I am fairly certain that’s how it works. In other words, things that are Tiled cannot be misplaced, unless my suspicions are correct and small, important things in my possession can actually create wormholes in the very fabric of space and time and disappear at will. There’s no news yet on whether the Tile app will enable object-tracking through temporal distortions – no doubt they’ll issue an update that covers this in due course.

Then again, do the creators of Tile really know what they’re up against? I am a black-belt at misplacing important items. I have lost a set of house keys /the day before going on holiday/. Without them, I couldn’t lock the back door of our house, which was already well-known to the criminal underworld of South East London thanks to the break-in we’d been treated to just weeks earlier. In a state of panic, the Other Half rush-ordered a temporary door lock, which arrived at considerable expense the next morning and all was well. We went away, still perilously oblivious as to the exact location of our back-door keys, only for them to turn up in the lining of the door seal of our washing machine after it had completed a full cycle of dirty holiday clothes. Would a plucky little Tile have put up with that, doggedly bleeping away from within the salty bowels of the washer-dryer as we fretted on the French coast? I doubt it.

All this is very well and futuristic of course, but what of The Pen? Our return home, delayed slightly thanks to a wander through Old Street and the altogether nicer Bankside, led to more fraught searching of bags and personages, and the grey, relentless creep of resignation that, once again, Tile or no Tile, something else had disappeared. After a moment’s pondering, though, Other Half came to the rescue. “Found it,” she cried, “in the lining of the inside pocket of that bloody bag. For God’s sake, get yourself a pencil case like a grown man,” she said, paradoxically. “A man can’t just carry a pen around without losing it, can he?”

Maybe if it was WiFi-enabled, tethered or lived in the cloud he could.