Lost Objects

I recently began wondering whether the Death Star would have had a Lost and Found.

Does an oppressive military regime still care about returning carelessly lost personal property to individuals, or are they more about "finders keepers"?

Do clones even have personal property?

I know this is pretty derivative of Clerk's Star Wars banter regarding dead contractors.

But still, I pressed on.

I wondered... Do US military bases have Lost and Found? Turns out they do.

I then began wondering about the history of Lost and Found, and fell into a Wikipedia research hole there.

First, to answer my question about military regime's caring about personal property, it turned out Napolean established one of the first modern Lost and Found offices in Paris in 1805.

And it turns out that the very first written accounts of lost and found pop up around 718 AD.

I then fell a little deeper down the Wikipedia hole after reading about Theft by Finding. Which I'm sure I knew about, but I just like how it is stated, and the idea that by not putting in some due dilliegence, you commit a crime.

By far all the angriest moments in my life have been around me not being able to find something.

So many things in this world have indeterminate answers. Every important existential question. Unified theory? May or may not be a thing. Every problem has a nearly inexhaustible number of solutions, each with a variance of pros and cons.

But the problem of not being able to find a physical object? That has a single and precise answer. In relation to the gravity well we stand on there exist polar coordinates for the precise location of the matter of that object. It is a permanent object somewhere, mocking you from beyond your field of view.

For the last decade or so, whenever I would misplace things, I would, in my head, immediately blame my wife. While I lack organizational skills, I usually have a pretty good sense of where I last placed a thing, and someone who feels the need to order my chaos is an obvious source of blame. Surely she moved the item, breaking the location pointer in my head

The thing is, for the last decade, it has pretty much never been her fault. When I do locate the object, I immediate realize it was me who absent-mindedly repositioned the object.

A friend once asked how we could possibly get along, as she is clearly tidy and I am the opposite. I believe the answer is an over-abundance of patience on her part, in her daily struggle against the entropy of me and my stacks of objects which I found momentarily interesting.

My problem, is that I am in love with the idea that I may theoretically build things some day, and for each object it is all too easy for me to squint at is and see a potential possible use.

Broken toy car? A pinata of remote controlled servo motors. Old alarm clocks? Electric timers.

I do not know enough to build most things, but I know that without any materials I can provably not build anything.