If the Boss has no clue how disorganized I really am, it’s only through dumb luck. So far, whenever he’s called and asked for something, I’ve been able to find it in short order. That isn’t because of my filing system, which is haphazard, or my memory, which is getting Swiss cheesy. It’s sheer luck, plus my talent for putting him off the scent. I mean, sometimes when there’s a little problem I can’t solve, it’s best to point out a bigger problem (especially if it’s one that he can solve; he loves that).

Anyway, the Boss wasn’t involved in today’s crisis. It was all of my own making, and it had elements of both the haphazard filing and the cheesy memory. In getting ready for the year-end forms I have to do this month, I needed last year’s 1099s and W-2s for The Kennel. For the construction company, I’ve been doing it for nearly twenty years, so I have a sort of a system (however haphazard and cheesy it might be). But last year was the first for The Kennel, and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what I did with my copies of those forms.

I looked. And looked and looked, using up all of the last half of the afternoon. I went through every pile of loose papers in my house, and that accounts for a lot of papers. I started with the place where I thought I’d left the forms, and then moved on to where I should have put them, and by the end of the ordeal I was looking in places where they couldn’t possibly be, not in a million years. And then I looked in all those places again.

When I found them (and I knew I would, because where could they go?), they were in fact in one of the file boxes I’d already looked through at least twice. They were in a manila folder that wasn’t labeled, but at least they weren’t up in the loft in the stacks of credit card receipts from 1997, or in my bedroom under the pile of vintage magazines that I never got around to reading and never will.

By the end of this nightmare, I once again felt as if I’d spent the day digging ditches. And even after I found what I was looking for, I kept thinking of other places to look for it. I collapsed into the recliner, but every so often I’d bolt upright and start moving toward some new phantom location — to look for something I’d already found. It’s probably a good thing the weekend is here.