Last night I misplaced my AirPods. I didn’t realize it until this morning, when I always take them off of my dresser and put them in my pocket. At 7:15 AM, they were gone.

I didn’t mind at first. I knew they were at home, because I wore them while I was unpacking the groceries, but I had no idea what became of them. I looked for them at breakfast time, and couldn’t find them. After I finished a project at work this morning I looked again, more thoroughly. They weren’t in any of the usual places I put them. They weren’t in my clothes. They weren’t in the couch cushions.

I started to get worried that something weird had happened to them. Perhaps someone threw them out. Perhaps they had fallen somewhere I could never retrieve them. I started to wonder if I would them years from now when we move out.

By lunchtime, which is when I use my AirPods most often, I started to get desperate. Instead of going for my daily walk, I turned over the entire house looking for them. I started looking for my AirPods in crazy places throughout my house where they never could be: inside the refrigerator, inside various drawers and cabinets, and on the floor between my desk and the wall.

I almost ordered new ones from Amazon, just to make the problem go away. The generation 2 AirPods were at an all-time low price today, but they wouldn’t be delivered until sometime in January, so it didn’t seem worth it. But, I saw that the new generation 3 AirPods could be delivered tomorrow. They just cost about $100 more. I almost bought them, but stopped short because I had to go back to work.

At long last, in the middle of the afternoon, when I decided to prepare a load of towels for the wash, I found them hiding at the bottom of the towel hamper. I have no idea how they fell in there, but I was enormously relieved to get them back.

It’s so silly, isn’t it?