The RING. Lost.....and Found

On my anniversary of working 35 years at St. Elizabeth Hospital, I got a ring as a gift from the Sisters. (For working 42 ½ years, I got retirement….but I digress).

I wore this new ring on my little finger because my knuckles were too big and arthritic to wear on any other finger. I don’t think I had worn it more than a few months when one morning at work, while drying my hands I noticed it wasn’t on my finger. In the hospital setting, you wash your hands before, during and after having touched about anything, a patient, equipment, supplies…you wash them a lot. I immediately thought it had come off in the paper towels I was using to dry my hands but after searching through them it wasn’t there. I put on some gloves and went through the nearby trash can and opened every rolled up, wet paper towel to see if it had been thrown in there during one of the other times I had washed. It wasn't. 

Our department had multiple rooms, so I went through every trash can in every room. No luck. Then I thought maybe it had gotten rolled up in the linen used on the imaging camera beds so I got out all the linen from the laundry hampers and looked through them. No. When it wasn’t there I began to backtrack to where I had been that day. I had been down the hall to the CT scanner to help earlier, but didn’t find it there. I checked in Ultrasound next door, nope. Back in the department I looked under every imaging table, on work spaces, under work tables, in the corners of the room, in the wheel chairs…it was nowhere to be found. 

I asked myself when did I last remember having it on? Did I even leave home wearing it? I couldn’t be sure. 

I contacted lost and found and asked them to notify me if someone turned it in. When I got to my car after work, I searched through it. When I got home I looked everywhere...twice. Days went by, weeks went by and no luck. I eventually figured it had gone to the trash compactor and destroyed at work or someone found it and said, “hey look, a ring” and put it in their pocket. I was angry with myself for a long time for having been so careless to lose it. I eventually went for long periods of time having forgotten about it and then something would remind me and I’d curse myself again for losing it.

Fast forward about 9 years. 

A month or so ago, we had a nasty wind storm blow through. It was so strong that it blew a TV antenna down in our neighborhood, a couple houses away from ours. When the antenna fell over onto nearby power lines, the lights at our house flickered off and on a couple of times and then finally the power went out completely. After a few minutes, when I realized it wasn’t coming back on anytime soon, I called the local power company to report it and within an hour, several trucks were in the neighborhood with half-dozen workers trying to figure out how to get that antenna off the lines and fix the problem. Finally after 3 hours without power, the lights and electricity was back on and we were good to go.
 
As I walked through the house resetting all the clocks, I got to the one on our gas stove and the control panel was black, I couldn’t set the clock, I couldn’t get it to do anything. (It’s a gas stove but it has electric ignition to light the burners and the oven). Everything else in the kitchen was on and working, just not the control panel on the stove. 

I went to the basement to check the circuit breaker box to reset it, but there was nothing to reset, they were all ON. We found that the gas burners could light on the cooktop, the electric igniters worked, there was just no main power to run the oven. We pulled the stove out about a foot and saw about 2 pounds of dog hair (we’ve had 2 black labs and a golden retriever since we re-did the kitchen) and dust back there along with some food crumbs. Cindy decided we couldn’t have a repairman come and see that mess so we got the sweeper out, leaned over the counter and sucked up the hair and crumbs to make it look presentable. 

The next day I stopped at Reese’s Maytag, the appliance store we have bought from and had service with for years and explained things to them. They said the control panel likely had burned out a power component. I asked if Rob or Mike were available since they had been to the house before to service other appliances. She said Rob had a recent surgery and was off for a few weeks. She then said Mike was their independent guy they used when Rob was busy and gave me his number to call. I called Mike and was told he was busy for a week or so but his son had joined the business and he could come by in a couple of days. Since the stove and microwave worked, we knew we could limp along for a few days until he came by so we said okay. 

Well the day came and we explained the situation and he too couldn’t get it to work and said the main board may have shorted out but he’d pull the stove out and give it a look and see what he could do. After pulling the stove all the way out, we found more dog hair, more dust, an ink pen a few cookies and more crumbs. I again got the sweeper and he started to clean up the mess. After a few seconds, the hose got plugged and wouldn’t pick anything else up. He turned the sweeper off and realized it was plugged with some hair and one of the cookies that he sucked up. He got a screw driver out of his work kit and poked it down the tube to break up the cookie and then turned the hose upside down so the cookie crumbs could fall out. Well they did….along with my ring that I thought I lost at work 9 years before.
 
After a few “I’ll be damned and son-of-a-guns” we all got a laugh as we realized the luck of the plugged up sweeper hose. If the cookie hadn’t blocked the hose, the ring would’ve been sucked into the sweeper bag and I would have dumped the bag in the trash and thrown it out, never knowing the ring was inside.
 
To make this story even more weird, he started checking the power boards and looking up the price and availability of each board to see what it might cost. As we discussed that it might be cheaper to buy a new stove, he decided to unplug the stove and plug it back in. 

You can guess what happened. Yep. Power came back on. After some more testing he said it may not last long, but it was working now. I then teased him saying we only had him come out so he could find my ring, to which he replied that he was happy he could help and and that’ll be $59.95 for the service call. We all had a good laugh. 

Well, a month or so later, the oven still works…and I’ve got my ring back. I’m happy.

 REMEMBER:

Today, you could be standing next to someone who is trying their best not to fall apart, so whatever you do today, do it with kindness in your heart.

Be talkin' to ya.

Dan