With improving technology, what’s lost is quickly found again

The day may be approaching when the only things we risk losing are time and our minds

When it comes to the lost and found department, you’ll always find me in the losers’ section.

I’ve lost enough gloves, hats and scarves to open a men’s clothing shop, enough pens to run a stationery store, enough keys to run a hotel chain.

My biggest accomplishment was losing a seven-foot pair of skis I put in my cluttered office and never saw again. Maybe they couldn’t stand the mess and skied away.

There’s nothing I lose more often than my keys. Over the years I’ve left them in restaurants, movies, taxis and on the conveyor belt at the supermarket. I’ve lost them in a snow bank and even down a sewer drain while I was fixing my car.

I’m not alone. People have been losing keys for thousands of years, ever since the Greeks invented the first one and immediately lost their only copy.

That’s why I was thrilled to discover a new wonder product that promised to end my losing ways. It’s a little one-inch plastic square I bought online that has a tracking device inside.

You just attach it to your keys, then it locates exactly where the keys are on your phone’s GPS. So when you misplace them, you instantly know whether you’ve left them in the front door or on a plane heading back to Florida.

Once you locate your keys and make your way back to them, you just press a phone button — and the little square starts blasting a frantic circus tune so you can find it.

The first day I got the gadget, I was blown away. I kept hiding my keys under the sofa, or behind the lasagna in the freezer — then pressing the phone button to find them.

The technology is similar to cellphones, which often have a “find-my-phone” feature to track them down. But it’s also part of our growing new GPS technology that’s rapidly eliminating the barrier between lost and found.

As I tested my new gadget I had a vision, a reverie, that this was about finding ourselves, too.

Ever since Neanderthals slouched out of their caves, we humans have been trying to figure out where we are. Over the millenniums we’ve gradually gathered clues — from the moss on trees, to the position of the stars, to the badgering of our spouses telling us we missed the exit with our ox cart.

“I told you to go left at the Pyramids ... LEFT! But no, you wouldn’t listen. Now we’re never going to make it to the Promised Land.”

Many famous explorers spent years getting lost before they accidentally discovered something. But today your GPS guides you everywhere, turn by turn — so you can’t make mistakes.

If Jacques Cartier had owned one, he wouldn’t have named the Lachine Rapids (the China Rapids) — because his GPS would have told him he was in Montreal.

In my reverie I could see a more forgiving and less forgetful future. Once these tracking devices get tiny we’ll attach them to our glasses, gloves and other clothing — and end the single sock crisis.

Even humans will have tiny tracking devices embedded in us, so we can’t get lost for long either.

Gradually, we’ll lose the whole concept of being lost — or losing things. People and stuff will just go momentarily missing — before we press a phone button and expect to find them.

BOY: What’s going on, Dad? I haven’t seen my hat all day. … I keep beeping it but it doesn’t respond. It’s weird — like a sci-fi movie!

DAD: Geez, son — I hate to say this, but I think your hat may actually be ... lost.

SON: Lost? — what’s that Dad? Do you mean like … in another dimension?

My reverie ended two weeks after I got the gadget, when my phone suddenly started blasting a circus tune and texted: “Congratulations! Your keys have been located!”

The trouble was they weren’t missing — they were in my pocket. Later that day the tune played again offering more congratulations: first in a supermarket line and then a movie theatre — where it took a lot of fiddling to turn the tune off, as people hissed.

I checked how to fix the problem online, then followed the instructions — and the next day the tune played at a funeral, then a symphony. Now it plays everywhere I go — meetings, my dentist’s, public bathrooms — congratulating me again and again.

It’s gotten so bad I hear the circus tune in my sleep — and I’m almost ready to throw the gadget out. I’ve decided it’s better to lose your keys than lose your mind.

In fairness, I know other people who’ve bought the same gadget and say it usually works fine — and only rings when something needs to be found.

But some of us were born to lose.

Once these tracking devices get tiny we’ll attach them to our glasses, gloves and other clothing — and end the single sock crisis.