Vic –
The absent screw turned up on your bench… You too have a house-proud mouse in your workshop?
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Some years ago – before I owned a computer – I wanted to carry out an rather awkward calculation, a bit too much for pencil-and-paper. I forget what but it was model-engineering related.
Could not find my scientific calculator anywhere!
Slide-rule then? Could not find that either.
Nothing for it but to use logarithm tables, with a little revision from the example in an old engineering text-book that contains the tables.
Next day, went to Woolworths for a replacement calculator; surprised to find that in a reverse pattern to early portable 'phones they'd not shrunk but expanded from shirt-pocket to cagoule-pocket dimensions.
Three weeks later, searching for something else, I opened a drawer and there was the original calculator! I decided homes and workshops develop tiny black-holes, floating randomly but invisibly around the place (light can't escape…). They eagerly swallow anything loose in gravity-range but with insufficient energy to sustain themselves, soon dissipate and drop their loot anywhere but where you'd originally put it.