Last week, I was paying bills and balancing the checkbook and making sure receipts were recorded in the check register. Yes, I still pay bills the old fashioned way, keeping all the relevant materials in a folder near my computer...it's a symptom of idiocy as well as loyalty to a bank that doesn't have online banking. Well, not loyalty. Laziness. It would be a huge pain in the butt to change banks at this point.
Anyway, overcome with an AR/OC tendency to be hyper-organized, I decided to separate all the receipts for Christmas stuff into their own envelope. I even labeled the envelope "Christmas Receipts" because the idea of just separating them out wasn't AR/OC enough. After I wrote the label, however, I realized that Nick might see it and snoop through it, so I put the envelope someplace safe, out of sight.
Monday evening, when I was bagging up some items to return to Target, I thought, "Now, where did I stash that envelope?"
Y'all know where this is going because chances are good that you have been there yourself.
It turns out that our brains are actually really bad at remembering where we hide stuff. Squirrels might remember the locations of thousands of nuts hidden away for winter, but humans...well, let's just say our memories for hiding places are not the best. Consider the case of a man named Tom who hid $4,000 worth of gold coins in a dried-out paint can. Years later, when a friend came over to help him do some painting, he and the friend tossed all the old cans of paint in a dumpster. Months later, it popped into Tom's head that the gold coins had been in one of those cans.
Tom's story is included in a wonderful book titled Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Above Average. If you want to understand why you commit idiotic mistakes, read this book. It's entertaining, informative, well-written, and extremely comforting while you're reading it. It will not, however, help you learn to avoid these mistakes because we're hardwired for them. When I realized I'd lost the Christmas receipts envelope, this book was the first thing that popped into my head. At least I hadn't thrown away $4,000 worth of gold coins.
That didn't, however, make me feel any better as I fretted over the location of the envelope. And boy did I fret. I must have asked the universe twenty times, "Where the heck is that envelope?" I asked it so often even George pitched in to help me find it. As is so often the case, I was doing the dishes when suddenly, the location of the envelope popped out of nowhere into my frontal lobe. I shed my rubber gloves and opened the folder I keep bill stuff in. There it was.
God, bless me. I am an idiot.