Gremlins Or Situational Blindness?

Either the brain is a weird thing or there really are gremlins. Or house elves. Or pixies. I always get them mixed up.

It’s not like I really believe in supernatural critters. My degree is in physics, not psychics; I studied astronomy, not astrology; cosmology, not cosmetology. (You laugh, but working the swing shift for room service in college, I was studying one slow night when a cocktail waitress saw the title on my textbook and asked if I would do her hair.)

But I had this thing, a DVD I had burned, when all of a sudden as I needed it a day or two later it was gone. Start retracing my steps, looking high and low, but nothing found.

Look on my desk, on all of the bookshelves, in the living room, in the kitchen… Hell, I even looked in the bathrooms.

Maybe it fell down behind something. Maybe it just got put down someplace totally unexpected when the phone rang or some other distraction came up. Maybe it got mislabeled in a moment of stupidity and filed into the Twilight Zone.

No joy.

Okay, tear apart the desk and the stuff on the bookshelves where it should be and stay focused. Look, look again, don’t get distracted. Start looking into “what if” scenarios that are silly, but when you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever’s left…

Nada.

Start going through that big stack of recent DVDs to see if it got mislabeled. Time consuming when i would prefer to spend that time doing something else, like writing, or even catching up on some sleep.

Zip.

Finally I gave up. Went hunting online, tracked down some substitute material for a work-around. It was really late, I was getting punchy, so I just saved the files and would burn a new DVD in the morning.

(Wait for it…)

The next morning, as I walk by the same shelf next to my desk that I had searched a dozen times in the previous few days, there was a DVD case, face down. Turn it over and it’s (of course) the lost DVD.

How is it conceivable that I searched that location repeatedly and missed it sitting in plain sight?

Was it the house gremlins having some fun with me?

I like that explanation far better than the logical alternative, which is that I’m a serial doofuss and either losing it or showing signs of early onset Alzheimer’s.

Vision, optical illusions, and perception tricks and foibles have always interested me, so I know this type of weird behavior happens. I just wished that it didn’t happen to me.

Maybe it was just the house elves being mischievous. Maybe they’re just pissed because I keep getting them mixed up with the gnomes, trolls, pixies, and gremlins.