Car keys and other devious inanimate objects

In my last column, I described (eloquently) how appliances like home printers, electric shavers, coffee makers and hair dryers have perfected the technique of frustrating man by not working. These are good examples but not an exhaustive list: many other inanimate objects are eminently capable of not working equally well. But some inanimate objects find it difficult to not work. I refer to things like keys, spectacles, pens, scissors, scotch-tape, staplers, post-it notes, nail cutters, USB sticks and the funny contraptions storing electronic codes to access bank accounts. Therefore they employ a different technique to frustrate us: they get lost. My car keys are particularly good at this. When I'm in the office, they get out of my briefcase and park themselves in my desk drawer or computer bag, or travel to the pantry or conference room. At home, they have been known to leave the side table in the living room, travel across the dining room, pass through the kitchen, open the heavy back door, clamber up my top-loading washing machine, open the lid, rummage among the clothes till they find my trousers, maneuver themselves into the pockets and sit there smirking while I ransack the house searching. While my car keys usually roam around my home or office, where they have hours to kill, sometimes, for a little variety, they perform their traveling trick even when I'm only out of the car for a few moments. I'd once left my Maruti double parked on a busy Mumbai street, locking it without the keys (by pressing the button on the door's inside and closing it with the handle lifted), to pick up something. While I was at the street-side shop, the keys left my trouser pocket, went back to the car, unlocked the door, climbed inside, locked the door and sat inside the ignition slot, mocking me when I came back and shook the door in frustration. If my car keys get lost every time, I might take drastic action like tying them with nylon and stitching it into my skin. Realizing this, they often (usually on weekends when I'm in no hurry to go anywhere) sit innocently overnight wherever I place them and allow themselves to be demurely picked up the next day. But on weekday nights, they choose hiding places with deviousness that is in direct proportion to the importance of my next day's meeting. When I mentioned the torture my car keys subject me to, my friend agreed. "Tell me about it," he said, "Between my car and its keys, they give me hell. The car keeps breaking down; when it works, the keys keep getting lost. And now I think the car is learning from the keys. Last Sunday, it got lost in the mall's multi-story parking lot." Losing your car keys is irritating but what is more annoying is losing your spectacles because, while you don't need your car keys to find your car keys, you often need your glasses to look for your glasses. But the thingummy that has achieved nirvana - from the point of view of inanimate objects — is the television remote. It can get lost as ingeniously as any car key and not work as efficiently as any coffee maker. We keep our home television in the living room; yet the TV remote freely travels from there to our bedroom, bathroom, balcony, kitchen and sometimes even the car outside. Within these rooms, it hides in the most ingenious places. The other day, after spending two hours looking for it — time that should have been usefully spent watching a nail-biting reality show — I got a headache borne of frustration and went to the refrigerator for ice. And there, nestled next to the ice tray, I found the TV remote. But it simply would not work. It had gone and frozen itself to death. No amount of cajoling and coaxing (I even warmed it in the microwave) would make it budge. In the end we had to replace it. The only joy I get from these moving-and-hiding inanimate objects is when my mobile phone tries to get lost. I simply call it and it is forced to answer, revealing its whereabouts. I wish they would invent car keys that can be called the same way.