Tangled (in your sheets)

aka AirPod Persistence

A friend of mine was just telling me that over winter break they rented an apartment with the family, and one of the kids stayed in (on?) the pull-out couch in the living room. That kid was not the neatest knife in the drawer and every time anyone walked through their bedroom (which could not be helped because it was the central living room area) they saw the kid’s belongings strewn hither and yawn.

Nearing the end of the trip

the kid realized their AirPods were missing. They immediately assumed that someone (a sibling? a friend of a sibling? a cleaning person?) swiped them.

The dad made no such assumption.

He figured they probably fell behind the couch or in between the pillows or somewhere that would testify to the recklessness with which they had been treated until now.

The kid looked on Find My

and traced his pods to what looked like a massive laundry. Best guess is that the AirPods got lost in the sheets and went to be washed alongside the pillowcases, towels and assorted other bedding from their rental and other rentals just like theirs.

My friend spoke

to the guy who supervises the cleaning people and told him about the situation, and also showed him the screenshot indicating that the AirPods were in a local laundry.

Kind of alleging that

the cleaning people should be more diligent when changing the sheets (and not at all alleging that his own child should be more diligent when storing their electronics). Supervisor conceded his cleaning staff’s role in the matter and credited my friend’s account for the entire cost of replacing the AirPods.

Too bad he didn’t lose a Porsche in those sheets.

But also good for my friend for being persistent, and not just saying “They’ll never believe us, why bother trying.”

Meanwhile, the AirPods migrated

to another address, no longer at the industrial laundry site. Friend shared this, too, with the Supervisor.

A few weeks later, Supervisor followed up

saying that the second address was that of an employee, who, when confronted, admitted he had swiped them from the bedsheets. Employee was summarily dismissed from this place of employment and AirPods were returned to their rightful owner. Credit remained in place as repayment for the inconvenience.

Persistence-wise this is an impressive story.

Speaking up earned my friend a full credit, the original AirPods returned, and a consequence for the person who stole them. What more could they ask for?

So many of us give up too easily. Something is lost and we just imagine that we will never get it back. We tell ourselves that the laundry building is too big, that there are too many sheets, that the Supervisor is too busy to help us, that it’s our fault for leaving the AirPods in the sheets. Writers do the same thing.

We tell ourselves

that it’s too hard to get into a residency or an MFA program or a coveted online workshop. We tell ourselves that our project idea is stupid, and any way we will never finish it, and even if we did, we would never get it published. And for all of those reasons we never even start.

I’m sorry but

we’re wrong. People do get into things and get things published and win awards and would you like to know why? Because they applied. Because they wrote their stories, their poems, their books. Because they showed up on rainy days, on hot days, on winter days and put those words to paper.

Please remember that very often the difference between a successful writer and one who would like to be more successful is that one person did not give up. One person kept going no matter what mood they were in, no matter how hard it got, no matter what was tangled in their sheets. And that person could be you.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash