Why Finding?

Finding hard to find items begins as a frustration. You’re unable to just pull something off of a shelf somewhere, or you call around a little to the most likely places and come up empty. Then it’s less an inconvenience and becomes a challenge. You’re not going to let a little something like that thwart your plans or put a project on hold, no way. So you begin to search in earnest. Yellow pages. Internet search engines. Old codgers. No information source is left unturned, no half-remembered conversation isn’t dredged to the surface or your brain until you find it. But then you hit the wall; you know it’s out there, but it’s hiding out. Then forget about challenge, the finding becomes an obsession. Whispering in your ear at the dinner table, tickling your brain-pan the virus of NOT FINDING wends into your nervous system. There comes a time when you go to the professional – you tell yourself it’s not giving up, hiring someone else to find and do for you what you must abandon yourself, but you know. You know it could have been, doggone it, it SHOULD have been! But you’ve admitted defeat, truly, as soon as the smirky voice of the guy you’ve hired says, “You shoulda called me first. It woulda saved youse a lotta time, lady.” Ugh. I hate to lose.

This is what I determinedly sign myself up for daily, and I must admit I love it. Every time I find an item for a client I feel like I’ve won a race. Maybe I have won the race against the “not knowing.” It’s a game I play against the emptiness of ignorance, a battle between the lost and found. And then next time, I’ve got an edge on it.