The Great Key Search

Just about every weekday, Jesse and I take Dina to the park. I usually lock the door and put the key in my pocket, it keeps company with my car fob. My car has an electronic key, which I don't have to use to unlock the car door or start the engine. The transmitter just has to be near/in the car and they talk to each other. So I usually keep it in my pocket. My key ring has so many keys on it; I have keys to several people's homes, clients, neighbors and friends. I'm the spare key person :) So rather than carry around 2 pounds of keys while I'm walking my clients (my dog walking bag is already heavy enough), I remove that key and keep it in my pocket until I'm finished with the job, then I return it to the key ring.

Not long ago, Dina and I returned from our trip to the park, I started to unlock the door and found that the key wasn't in my pocket. At first, I thought I must have dropped it in my car and I tore my car apart looking for it. I really like my car, but if you drop something small in that car, it disappears. The space between the seats and the center console is just big enough for little items to fall in, but really difficult to get them out. There are electronic boxes under both front seats; it’s really difficult to reach around them to find things that fall under the seats. After a few minutes of hunting around and fishing under the seats, I realized the key wasn't in the car. I figured it had to be somewhere in the park. So we went back there to look for it... can you say needle in a haystack?

This park is very large, about 1.5 acres and we had, been all over it that afternoon. It seemed like an impossible task to find one key in all that space, but then I remembered that I'd pulled a poop bag out of my pocket to pick up after Dina. I thought maybe the key had been in that pocket and was pulled out along with the bag. The question was where was that location, I knew she'd gone somewhere in the northeast area of the first field, but I wasn’t sure exactly where. So I started searching in that corner, after about 40 minutes of wandering back and forth, I finally found the key... THANK GOD!!!! So I loaded the dogs back in the car (they'd been helping me look) and I brought Dina home again.

Lesson learned, now I put my client’s keys in my dog-walking bag and zip them in. I don't want to have to search for a client’s key ever again!!!!