Whew. Deep breath. Hold it. Now let it out.
I am not sure how this happened, but some
very important photographs turned up missing yesterday. Ash had mentioned on Sunday that she wanted to get these old photos digitized since we don't own a scanner. She had even attempted to take them to a service but had not had time for the past two weeks. She had some time this week and wanted to make it happen.
And here is where the disaster begins; they were missing. Vanished. No trace of them.
I helped her search for a manila folder full of photos and slides (which I had never seen before) for a very intense hour on Sunday night. We couldn't find them and had to go to sleep knowing they were still missing. I reassured her that they were on her desk at Google. She didn't think so. I reasoned with her that it was the last logical place for them to be.
First thing she did this morning was check her desk for the folder. She even had her coworkers search with her, to add eyes. Nothing. Nada. We each then tried the security desk at our offices and asked coworkers if they had seen them.
The photos were bumped up to "really lost" status and the rest of the day was spent thinking about where these photos were. We left work early in order to take advantage of the sunlight and look for them at home.
After another fruitless hour of looking through everything we own it was decided they were now "very lost" and we would have to start calling places we had visited, the people who had been over to the house recently, oh and put an advertisement in craigslist and the newspapers.
We also had no idea how long they had been lost. Had it been hours, days or perhaps even the full two weeks? Ash had no recollection of when the last time she saw them was, and I, as I stated before, had never seen the folder.
I decided there was one more place to look. It was a long-shot; but I felt that if we didn't look we might always wonder.
So I went out to the refuse bin, grabbed the bag inside and brought it upstairs. The refuse and recycling is collected on Tuesday. It would be a handful of hours before the collectors came to haul it off to the city dump.
I untied the cords holding closed the bag and started taking items out. I noticed there were some papers in the bag that we hadn't put in the recycling bin. That was strange. Digging in these discarded papers I saw something a dull orange in color; or was it manila.
Ashley had just peeked over my shoulder looking into the bag when she saw it and went in after it. Sure enough it was the photos, just slightly crumpled and largely undamaged.
She cried more finding them than when she thought they were lost.
We celebrated the discovery by breaking our diet for one meal down at the Thai restaurant. I rewarded myself extra with a Thai iced tea and a light beer. It isn't every day that you rescue something that precious from total disaster.
How they got into the bag is a mystery. I always double check our refuse (living with a mischievous cat makes you this way), and I was certain that there was no possibility a folder full of photos had been tossed. So much for certainty. At least there is a happy ending to this crisis.
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Created 55 weeks, 5 days ago