WildCard in the Wild

I nearly lost my WildCard again this week. Considering I still haven't bothered to trade the original in for one with the new ID numbers, it's always a little nerve-racking when this happens, though less so than when it was my bank card, too (take that, LaSalle!). It's turned up in some odd places over the years:

Twice I've left it in the library copiers. They have card readers so that you can pay for copies at a discount by using a debit system. Once I left it in a copier on the third or fourth floor in my rush to get to poetry class and didn't realize it until I was a good deal farther away from the third or fourth floor of the library. Fortunately, it was still there when I got back -- though someone had so kindly emptied the card of its remaining cash balance in the meantime. And then just a couple of weeks ago I left it there again, only to discover I had done so when I received an e-mail from the circulation desk saying it had been turned in. Unluckily for this good Samaritan, there were only eight cents left on the card at that point.

Once I lost it in my desk drawer. I had developed the bad habit of throwing all of my credit cards and loose change into the drawer rather than keeping them in a purse or wallet. Not only did this lead to me not having my WildCard when I needed to pay for meal plan food quite often, but stuff tended to slide around the drawer and disappear with great frequency. However, I only really stopped keeping my stuff there when my WildCard started to crack from being kept unprotected in my back pocket so much.

The strangest loss had to be the time I left it in the shower, though. Not the actual wet part of the shower (that would be very strange) but tucked between the towel rack and the wall in the PARC bathroom. I guess it had been in my back pocket again and slipped out, but instead of landing on the floor, it nearly disappeared behind the bolted-to-the-wall hooks. What possessed me to look there and what luck I must have had to see the edge peeking out still I'll never understand.

And where did it turn up today? Exactly where I thought I'd put it after the first time I went to Blomquist this quarter: my coat pocket. Why is this odd? Because it was the first place I looked . . . and the 10th place I looked . . . and the 20th place I looked . . . not until I had made some significant headway in straightening up my room did I go by the door again and, lo and behold, glance a spark of white in the very same pocket I had pulled apart already.

Perhaps it was merely being held hostage until I folded my laundry.