Perhaps this has happened to you and you’ll know what I’m talking about.

You start a project and find you need some widgets, so off to the big box you go to buy widgets.  After looking in the wrong place for a period of time, you break down and ask one of the associates where they might be.  And by golly, there they are.

These days of course you cannot just purchase the quantity you require.  You must buy a package of widgets or maybe more to come up with the number of widgets you need.  It will rarely come out equal.  Thereby, you are guaranteed to have widgets left over.

You hurry back home with your widgets and at some point you finish the project.  But remember those extra widgets you bought?  At this point you believe in your mind that there will come a time when you will need widgets again.  You take them and put them in a place that you KNOW you will remember.

Time passes and sure enough another project calls for widgets and you go to the place you KNOW you  put them.  Alas, no widgets.  Now here is a rule – as it cannot under any circumstance be that YOU forgot or might be confused about the location of the widgets, it is mandatory to immediately  blame your spouse, in my case my wife.   “Honey, where did you move those widgets I had right here?”  They claim their innocence, but you know deep in your heart they must have had something to do with the missing widgets.

So a search by the afore mentioned spouse ensues intertwined with an interrogation of yourself – “Are you sure you put them there?”,  “When did you see them last?”, “Do you really need them?”.  Eventually comes the all important question, “What do they look like?”  So the aforementioned spouse has been diligently searching for something they couldn’t recognize if they saw it.  You describe the missing widgets to the best of your ability. We’ve now arrived at the fork in the road and this thing can now go one of multiple ways:

a.  “Oh, you mean thing-a-ma-jigs.  I didn’t think you wanted them, so I threw them away.”

b.  “I saw those the other day over there in that drawer.”  The drawer is not where YOU put them, so spouse must have moved them is the only conclusion you can come to.

c. This is the worst possible outcome – “I just saw them where you said you had put them.”  This means you are an idiot and are not to be trusted to find even you own rear end.  If you can’t come up with an excuse why you couldn’t see the widgets right before you eyes, it’s best to praise aforementioned spouse about their keen eyesight and then leave the area immediately to avoid seeing the smug look you will be getting.

c. The missing widgets aka thing-a-ma-jigs cannot be found.  So off to the store to buy some more, which will result in more left overs.

This cycle can repeat a number of times until you finally come to a solution to the problem – never, never keep left over widgets in anticipation of using them in the future.  It is best to just pitch them in the trash.