I’ve had them burn/die/short out but I don’t know that I ever lost one. I left one at the hospital once and just didn’t go back to get it. Lots of people don’t bring a charger to the hospital so someone could definitely use it! But again, it was forgotten there not lost.
@Lynnerizer
I keep several chargers and cables as well as an “octopus” style set of plugs in my go to work backpack that enables me to charge basically any phone out there. This has saved me more than once in the ER for patients whose phones died when they needed to be discharged so they can find someone to come get them.
@chienfou
Ah ha, YOU are one of those lifesaver nurses! Pun intended! A double duty lifesaver! I appreciate you for all the people who don’t tell you. I’m sure you already know this but not all nurses go above and beyond like that.
@chienfou@Lynnerizer Well, Linnerizer beat me to it. Whatever you do in the ER, it sounds like you care about the patients, so thank you! Keep up the good work.
@andyw@Lynnerizer
Thank you both for your kind words. It always amazes me that folks get into medicine as a career that don’t like other people!
After 30 years as an ER nurse I technically retired last July (@69). Ive been doing a bunch of traveling since then, but still work 2 to 4 days a month in order to help fill in slots that they can’t cover, or for the nurses to go to grandkids/kids baseball games etc, etc. This keeps me on my toes, as well as having a few extra $$ for those trips! (I actually worked a few days last week for just those reasons).
@69@andyw@chienfou
You’re welcome!
After 30 years of ER work you deserve to be enjoying yourself in your retirement! And, it doesn’t surprise me at all that YOU are THAT person who fills in so others can take the time off to be with their family on important occasions.
My aunt was head nurse at our local hospital for over 45 years. It was always so comforting that I had a professional to call, especially when my stepson was small. Having a 14 month old baby that had endless, sleepless nights with the croup was a little scary for this childless young girl.
And BTW, what’s up with that username @69, is that REALLY a person’s username? I mean I know you were referring to your age but it sure looks like one…
@69@andyw@chienfou@ItalianScallion
Yeah I read @69’s profile but it’s a strange username (to anyone other than a horny male teenager Lol ) and I thought it was pretty ironic that it randomly popped up…
Is @69 still around?
@andyw@chienfou@Lynnerizer OK, now I’m curious. It’s obvious that anything that starts with an @ is considered a username by the forum software, but does it actually create a profile for something like @foobar or @xyzzy?
Update: Apparently it does create a profile with a seemingly random joined-on date.
@andyw@chienfou You’ve proven me wrong, @Lynnerizer. In my attempt to pick geeky “random” usernames, I apparently picked ones that other geeks picked. Hmmm… @WhoAmIToDisagree So that means that someone actually created an account with username 69.
@andyw@chienfou@Lynnerizer Well, among us older computer geeks, foobar and xyzzy were used as “random” words for filenames, placeholders, etc. Does anyone else besides me remember the origin of xyzzy?
@andyw@chienfou@ItalianScallion
Well I learned a lot from my Google search, it’s pretty interesting. It’s used for many different things, but it’s NOT a word that’s legal for Scrabble and MOST interesting was that you can actually pronounce it…
@chienfou@ItalianScallion@Lynnerizer I don’t remember xzzzy and I played the Colossal Cave. I didn’t get too far as I kept getting trapped in a maze with my flashlight dying, or something. That was 30 or more years ago. We got our first computer in about 1983. It was a Zorba which was like a Kaypro. I still have it, but we stopped using it when it stopped booting. It was “better” than the Kaypro in that each of the two floppy discs held about 280 K instead of the Kaypro’s about 240 K. No graphics, of course and my wife and I used Word Star which I was able to run in Windows (for fun) until Windows 10 arrived, IIRC.
And there is a non-sedating allergy medicine with the brand name of Xyzal, which I thought was bad name. Please don’t tell me one of you invented that name!
I used to play Hunt the Wumpus in the mid '70s on the PDP-10 where I went to college. After that I remember playing Adventure, skipping over Colossal Cave I guess, which was run by typing ADVENT because in those days there were six character limits to names of files and commands. (Ever wonder why there’s a software product called Matlab instead of Mathlab? Now you know.) Anyway… it was Adventure where xyzzy was coined to be a “magic” word to skip past the beginning parts of the game.
@chienfou@ItalianScallion@Lynnerizer Maybe I meant Adventure and not Colossal Cave. It began at a small house and you walked down a hill to a stream that entered the cave. Maybe they all began that way!
@chienfou@ItalianScallion@Kyeh@Lynnerizer I do Wordle3, but I don’t read the comments and other articles so I wasn’t aware kayak was a problem, especially since I have a couple! I don’t think xyzzy will make it there-I hope.
@chienfou@Lynnerizer The progression was from Hunt the Wumpus to Colossal Cave to Adventure. I don’t remember much of anything from the days I played these games (50+ years ago) other than a few phrases like “I smell a wumpus” and “I feel a draft.”
@andyw@chienfou@ItalianScallion@Lynnerizer I actually heard about the indignation over “kayak” from Seth Meyers on Late Night, but I dislike the words with repeating letters too. I doubt they’ll use “xyzzy” though! (It would be great in Scrabble, I bet!)
@ItalianScallion@Lynnerizer@kyeh@andyw
I can assure you it will NEVER be a Scrabble word… unless you bring extra letters. There’s only one Z in each game set!
@andyw@ItalianScallion@Kyeh@Lynnerizer
Neither have I… And to tell you the truth I’m not sure why I even knew that!
Now if I could just remember to do the things I’m supposed to do…
Forgot one in a hotel once. Lost at home as in which drawer did I stick it in? I keep the old style when I have to switch to something new. It has both saved me from buying a replacement and frustrated me looking for a specific one. I really need to declutter and find a new home for a bunch of stuff
I have not lost one that I am aware of. Looks like only about 14 of us wanted to brag about it! A lot of companies believe you have not lost them since they decided to stop supplying them in many cases.
@macromeh Potentially true, at least assuming that the place isn’t the Days Inn just west of downtown in Salt Lake City. The only time I stayed there, their policy was to just trash anything left behind in their rooms. I will never stay there again.
I don’t lose stuff often, but my stuff goes missing all the time.
Here’s why.
I’m the dad who has all the chargers and cables and batteries. When my kids (and wife too) lose their chargers, they come to me and “borrow” mine. Then, surprise surprise, they lose that one too. So now I have to get more from meh and keep these in my “soon to be lost” stash.
@pakopako Our libraries also have 3D printers, flatbed scanners, VCRs with capture cards and Desktop computers for video editing and such. You can check out Midi controllers, GoPros and podcast equipment. They even have a robot!
And an almost working “Baby Pac-Man” machine!
I couldn’t even imagine trying to do IT for our library!
Shout out to Chuck who does that IT stuff for the library!
I checked in at a Hilton Garden Inn a few years ago and almost immediately discovered that my usual phone charger brick wasn’t in the kit bag. The front desk had a bigger-than-breadbox collection of bricks and cables that they were delighted to let me select one from, and those were just the ones that had been in Lost & Found for more than a month and presumed abandoned. OTOH, about an hour after checking out from a Days Inn in SLC just west of downtown, I realized that I’d left the spare battery and charger for my mini receipt printer in the wall socket next to the sink, and immediately called them. They said that the room had already been cleaned and the charger and battery had apparently been trashed. I’ll never stay at that location again; they didn’t even try to have a Lost & Found for stuff that was left behind by mistake.
@werehatrack I dropped my charger when packing recently. I was not smart enough to look at it until I went to plug it in at the hotel. Of course the connector was snapped and not an easy fix. Tried the desk and all they had was an ancient version for sale. Lost and found was locked in housekeeping and the girl looked at me like I from Mars when I asked. Of course I had multiple cables at home but bought another rather than drive 6 hours.
I was on a cross-country Amtrak trip and when I arrived at my Airbnb in Chicago after the first leg of the trip, I couldn’t find the power supply for my laptop. I left it in my roomette in the train, so I took an Uber to Microcenter in Chicago, bought a new one, then an Uber back. It was the most expensive power supply I’ve ever bought, but at least I could use the laptop for the rest of the ten-day trip.
I will add that I have had two charging bricks destroyed by hotel lamp power sockets. The first time that one of the prongs got captured in the socket and wouldn’t come out, I thought it was an aberration. The second time, I learned never to put another one into one of those sockets. Shortly after that, I ran into a lamp at another hotel that had a broken off prong in it, and I recognized what the problem was. Since the second broken prong, I have made a point of packing a plug tripler and a power strip.
@werehatrack What an odd occurence. I have to wonder why? Just super tight tolerances? Or is something getting caught and can’t be pulled back out? I haven’t run into this issue, but then again I stay in hotels on average once per year.
@PooltoyWolf something in the really truly crummy two-prong sockets on those lamps engaged with the otherwise purposeless hole in the prong, and gripped it so hard that it was impossible to pull it loose. I established this later when I encountered one stuck in the third lamp, which I unplugged and took down to the front desk to point out the problem to them. The guy on the desk pulled out two tools, extracted the prong, pulled out another plug that had no holes in it, and bent the tab flush inside the socket that was causing the problem. He said he had thought that he had already done that to all of them, but this one must have slipped past. I decided never to take the chance again, and started carrying stuff that allowed me to just go straight to the wall.
I haven’t lost a charging block either and I have plenty from Meh.
Can’t remember the last time
Yeah, why is “nowhere/never” not a choice?
I mean, I guess I’ve misplaced a few in my house but I have them somewhere.
I’ve never lost one, and if I had, how would I know where I lost it?
@stolicat
It was in the last place you liked before you found it…
Yo mamma!
I don’t think I have ever lost one. I have so many though I could be wrong.
I’m actually amazed to see I’m not only not the only person to have never consciously lost one, but I seem to also be in the majority! Huh.
I’ve had them burn/die/short out but I don’t know that I ever lost one. I left one at the hospital once and just didn’t go back to get it. Lots of people don’t bring a charger to the hospital so someone could definitely use it! But again, it was forgotten there not lost.
@Lynnerizer
I keep several chargers and cables as well as an “octopus” style set of plugs in my go to work backpack that enables me to charge basically any phone out there. This has saved me more than once in the ER for patients whose phones died when they needed to be discharged so they can find someone to come get them.
@chienfou
A double duty lifesaver! 
I appreciate you for all the people who don’t tell you. I’m sure you already know this but not all nurses go above and beyond like that. 
Ah ha, YOU are one of those lifesaver nurses! Pun intended!
@chienfou @Lynnerizer Well, Linnerizer beat me to it. Whatever you do in the ER, it sounds like you care about the patients, so thank you! Keep up the good work.
@andyw @Lynnerizer
Thank you both for your kind words. It always amazes me that folks get into medicine as a career that don’t like other people!
After 30 years as an ER nurse I technically retired last July (@69). Ive been doing a bunch of traveling since then, but still work 2 to 4 days a month in order to help fill in slots that they can’t cover, or for the nurses to go to grandkids/kids baseball games etc, etc. This keeps me on my toes, as well as having a few extra $$ for those trips! (I actually worked a few days last week for just those reasons).
@69 @andyw @chienfou
You’re welcome!
After 30 years of ER work you deserve to be enjoying yourself in your retirement! And, it doesn’t surprise me at all that YOU are THAT person who fills in so others can take the time off to be with their family on important occasions.
My aunt was head nurse at our local hospital for over 45 years. It was always so comforting that I had a professional to call, especially when my stepson was small. Having a 14 month old baby that had endless, sleepless nights with the croup was a little scary for this childless young girl.
And BTW, what’s up with that username @69, is that REALLY a person’s username? I mean I know you were referring to your age but it sure looks like one…
@chienfou @Lynnerizer oh no, those octopus wires always die on me after a weekend
@andyw @chienfou @Lynnerizer Here a bit from @69’s profile:
@69 @andyw @chienfou @ItalianScallion
Lol 
) and I thought it was pretty ironic that it randomly popped up… 
Yeah I read @69’s profile but it’s a strange username (to anyone other than a horny male teenager
Is @69 still around?
@69 @andyw @ItalianScallion @Lynnerizer
Totally wasn’t thinking of that as an @ username. Guess I’m finally grown up!
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@andyw @chienfou @Lynnerizer OK, now I’m curious. It’s obvious that anything that starts with an @ is considered a username by the forum software, but does it actually create a profile for something like @foobar or @xyzzy?
Update: Apparently it does create a profile with a seemingly random joined-on date.
@andyw @chienfou @foobar @ItalianScallion @xyzzy
So those are actually real accounts made in 2015 and 2018? IDK…
If I make up a username like @IDK_anything it’s not going to show any profile page…
@andyw @chienfou You’ve proven me wrong, @Lynnerizer. In my attempt to pick geeky “random” usernames, I apparently picked ones that other geeks picked. Hmmm… @WhoAmIToDisagree So that means that someone actually created an account with username 69.
@andyw @chienfou @ItalianScallion
What were the chances of THAT happening? 
Ha!
Yeah, that’s too funny!
@andyw @chienfou @Lynnerizer Well, among us older computer geeks, foobar and xyzzy were used as “random” words for filenames, placeholders, etc. Does anyone else besides me remember the origin of xyzzy?
@andyw @chienfou @ItalianScallion
Well I learned a lot from my Google search, it’s pretty interesting. It’s used for many different things, but it’s NOT a word that’s legal for Scrabble and MOST interesting was that you can actually pronounce it…
@chienfou @ItalianScallion @Lynnerizer I don’t remember xzzzy and I played the Colossal Cave. I didn’t get too far as I kept getting trapped in a maze with my flashlight dying, or something. That was 30 or more years ago. We got our first computer in about 1983. It was a Zorba which was like a Kaypro. I still have it, but we stopped using it when it stopped booting. It was “better” than the Kaypro in that each of the two floppy discs held about 280 K instead of the Kaypro’s about 240 K. No graphics, of course and my wife and I used Word Star which I was able to run in Windows (for fun) until Windows 10 arrived, IIRC.
And there is a non-sedating allergy medicine with the brand name of Xyzal, which I thought was bad name. Please don’t tell me one of you invented that name!
@chienfou @Lynnerizer
@andyw, you almost had it! Nice story too!
I used to play Hunt the Wumpus in the mid '70s on the PDP-10 where I went to college. After that I remember playing Adventure, skipping over Colossal Cave I guess, which was run by typing ADVENT because in those days there were six character limits to names of files and commands. (Ever wonder why there’s a software product called Matlab instead of Mathlab? Now you know.) Anyway… it was Adventure where xyzzy was coined to be a “magic” word to skip past the beginning parts of the game.
@chienfou @ItalianScallion @Lynnerizer Maybe I meant Adventure and not Colossal Cave. It began at a small house and you walked down a hill to a stream that entered the cave. Maybe they all began that way!
@andyw @chienfou @ItalianScallion @Lynnerizer
Can you imagine how pissed people will be if they ever use “xzzzy” for the Wordle solution?! People were mad about “kayak!”
@chienfou @ItalianScallion @Kyeh @Lynnerizer I do Wordle3, but I don’t read the comments and other articles so I wasn’t aware kayak was a problem, especially since I have a couple! I don’t think xyzzy will make it there-I hope.
@chienfou @Lynnerizer The progression was from Hunt the Wumpus to Colossal Cave to Adventure. I don’t remember much of anything from the days I played these games (50+ years ago) other than a few phrases like “I smell a wumpus” and “I feel a draft.”
@chienfou @ItalianScallion @Lynnerizer plugh
@andyw @chienfou @ItalianScallion @Lynnerizer I actually heard about the indignation over “kayak” from Seth Meyers on Late Night, but I dislike the words with repeating letters too. I doubt they’ll use “xyzzy” though! (It would be great in Scrabble, I bet!)
@chienfou @ItalianScallion @werehatrack
Plugh, It’s a whatchamacallit! Lol
@ItalianScallion @Lynnerizer @kyeh @andyw
I can assure you it will NEVER be a Scrabble word… unless you bring extra letters.
There’s only one Z in each game set!
@andyw @chienfou @ItalianScallion @Lynnerizer OH, okay! I haven’t played it for years.
@andyw @chienfou @ItalianScallion @Kyeh
Me neither!
@andyw @ItalianScallion @Kyeh @Lynnerizer
Neither have I… And to tell you the truth I’m not sure why I even knew that!
Now if I could just remember to do the things I’m supposed to do…
@andyw @chienfou @ItalianScallion @Kyeh @Lynnerizer It can be intermittently very relaxing to have ADHSquirrel!
Mine don’t disappear, they multiply. I just dropped off a gallon size ziploc bag full of bricks at Goodwill.
Thanks for creating the thread.
I’ve never lost any either. For fun, here’s an AI version of a drawer full of them.
@kittykat9180 I wonder which of them are UL/ETL listed… These might not even be meh.
@ItalianScallion @kittykat9180
Many of them have interesting plug prongs.
Yes, I am sometimes easily amused.
@ItalianScallion @werehatrack, ha ha. I noticed that too. AI still has some improvements to make.
@kittykat9180 @werehatrack I’m sure @drunkcat will have some suggestions about AI improvements.
Forgot one in a hotel once. Lost at home as in which drawer did I stick it in? I keep the old style when I have to switch to something new. It has both saved me from buying a replacement and frustrated me looking for a specific one. I really need to declutter and find a new home for a bunch of stuff
@speediedelivery This
I have not lost one that I am aware of. Looks like only about 14 of us wanted to brag about it! A lot of companies believe you have not lost them since they decided to stop supplying them in many cases.
@andyw
Yeah, companies don’t include them anymore yet they still write in their manuals to use one specific to their product!
Um, if I knew where I lost it, it wouldn’t be lost.
@macromeh this is the only right answer!
@macromeh Potentially true, at least assuming that the place isn’t the Days Inn just west of downtown in Salt Lake City. The only time I stayed there, their policy was to just trash anything left behind in their rooms. I will never stay there again.
I don’t lose stuff often, but my stuff goes missing all the time.
Here’s why.
I’m the dad who has all the chargers and cables and batteries. When my kids (and wife too) lose their chargers, they come to me and “borrow” mine. Then, surprise surprise, they lose that one too. So now I have to get more from meh and keep these in my “soon to be lost” stash.
@xenophod ever consider doing IT at a library? It is exactly that role (and probably pay) - but you get to fight over a budget!
@pakopako Our libraries also have 3D printers, flatbed scanners, VCRs with capture cards and Desktop computers for video editing and such. You can check out Midi controllers, GoPros and podcast equipment. They even have a robot!
And an almost working “Baby Pac-Man” machine!
I couldn’t even imagine trying to do IT for our library!
Shout out to Chuck who does that IT stuff for the library!
I checked in at a Hilton Garden Inn a few years ago and almost immediately discovered that my usual phone charger brick wasn’t in the kit bag. The front desk had a bigger-than-breadbox collection of bricks and cables that they were delighted to let me select one from, and those were just the ones that had been in Lost & Found for more than a month and presumed abandoned. OTOH, about an hour after checking out from a Days Inn in SLC just west of downtown, I realized that I’d left the spare battery and charger for my mini receipt printer in the wall socket next to the sink, and immediately called them. They said that the room had already been cleaned and the charger and battery had apparently been trashed. I’ll never stay at that location again; they didn’t even try to have a Lost & Found for stuff that was left behind by mistake.
@werehatrack I dropped my charger when packing recently. I was not smart enough to look at it until I went to plug it in at the hotel. Of course the connector was snapped and not an easy fix. Tried the desk and all they had was an ancient version for sale. Lost and found was locked in housekeeping and the girl looked at me like I from Mars when I asked. Of course I had multiple cables at home but bought another rather than drive 6 hours.
I was on a cross-country Amtrak trip and when I arrived at my Airbnb in Chicago after the first leg of the trip, I couldn’t find the power supply for my laptop. I left it in my roomette in the train, so I took an Uber to Microcenter in Chicago, bought a new one, then an Uber back. It was the most expensive power supply I’ve ever bought,
but at least I could use the laptop for the rest of the ten-day trip.
It fell out of my pocket at Aldi.
@tricityladytn And they put it in a bin and sold it for a dollar, right?
My question would be where is the strangest place you have found one? Because if it’s lost …
@selenarella At the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
I don’t lose anything. They lose me.
I will add that I have had two charging bricks destroyed by hotel lamp power sockets. The first time that one of the prongs got captured in the socket and wouldn’t come out, I thought it was an aberration. The second time, I learned never to put another one into one of those sockets. Shortly after that, I ran into a lamp at another hotel that had a broken off prong in it, and I recognized what the problem was. Since the second broken prong, I have made a point of packing a plug tripler and a power strip.
@werehatrack What an odd occurence. I have to wonder why? Just super tight tolerances? Or is something getting caught and can’t be pulled back out? I haven’t run into this issue, but then again I stay in hotels on average once per year.
@PooltoyWolf something in the really truly crummy two-prong sockets on those lamps engaged with the otherwise purposeless hole in the prong, and gripped it so hard that it was impossible to pull it loose. I established this later when I encountered one stuck in the third lamp, which I unplugged and took down to the front desk to point out the problem to them. The guy on the desk pulled out two tools, extracted the prong, pulled out another plug that had no holes in it, and bent the tab flush inside the socket that was causing the problem. He said he had thought that he had already done that to all of them, but this one must have slipped past. I decided never to take the chance again, and started carrying stuff that allowed me to just go straight to the wall.
If I knew where I last lost it then it wouldn’t be lost would it?
@Kidsandliz
In general you find things in the last place you look for them.
@chienfou @Kidsandliz Unless you only find some of them, in which case the Quest is partly fulfilled but must still continue.
@chienfou @Kidsandliz @werehatrack So Easter egg hunts should realistically last for way more than just an afternoon?
KuoH