Vernier caliper

D’you ever wonder if you are the completely stupidest pillock in the entire galaxy? D’you ever wonder if, in the furthermost spiral arm of the Andromeda Nebula there exists a small inhabitable exoplanet on which there has evolved a tiny bacterium that is actually stupider than you yourself are? - I do this daily. I take a pre-existing object, for which I have extracted good money from my wallet and handed it to Scott at Rural Supplies where he occasionally has decent engineering tools but mostly has cheap Chinese crap, and I place it in an abstracted fashion in some obscure place where I will never, ever find it again.

Today it was the Vernier caliper. Again. I carry a Vernier round the workshop almost all the time because I have not got enough intelligence to devise a system of keeping all my 1.75 inch tubing in one labelled spot and all my 48mm tubing in another labelled spot, and when I have selected the correct piece of tubing I lose interest and wander off and the Vernier caliper disappears for approximately ever.

Bastard.

Then follows the long and tedious process of Tidying Up, by which everything gets itself found again. Mostly, glasses. You know you are getting Elderly when you put your glasses down and wander off and your senile mind can’t recall where you were or what you were doing when or why you took them off, and you know you’re already Elderly because when you were young and agile you didn’t need glasses in the first place and wondered what it would be like to be your father who was unable to see anything at all without an optical instrument in front of his head, mostly a microscope or a telescope but sometimes mere spectacles.

A father. And his ten-inch telescope. Which, at the time, was the biggest refractor in the Southern Hemisphere.

Once I lost an adjustable spanner. I put it down momentarily in a Convenient Spot and thirteen years later, when we came to move house, I found that the Convenient Spot had been the ladder hanging on hooks embedded in the side of the garage wall. Once I lost a fifteen mil spanner but that was because I left it on the wall outside when swapping Greg’s pedals for him, and a thieving bastard helped himself as he wandered by. Once I lost an assassin’s crossbow, which Mr. Elmy gave me and which I was a bit nonplussed by, but afterwards when discussing it with the late Dr. Flewett, who had made it and had given it to Mr. Elmy, which he revealed by stating that the only one of his assassins’ crossbows that was not in his own possession had been given to Mr. Elmy, did I discover that Mr. Elmy had been nonplussed by it as well. What are you supposed to do with an assassin’s crossbow anyway? Indeed, why was Dr. Flewett in the habit of making assassins’ crossbows? Did he really dislike his patients that much? - Um, knowing several general practitioners, Yes is the probable answer. - Anyway some future owner of this property is going to surprise himself by discovering a very small crossbow tucked away in a Safe Place somewhere, and it’s a very safe place indeed because I have no idea at all where I hid it.

Today, as stated, it was the Vernier. I found it, in the end, when I opened my notebook and discovered it had been promoted to a bookmark.

Still, at least the work bench’s a bit tidier.

Bastard.