What is where

October 23, 2025

Historical Overview

At some point in my life, around middle-to-high school age, I became the household expert on “where everything is.”

Any household item, tool, or whatever — I tracked automatically, and when someone asked, “Where’s our screwdriver with the black handle?” I confidently knew that yesterday it had been used outside near the bicycle, and was still there instead of in its usual drawer in the house.

It seems that back then I could — or at least, I can now — recreate in my mind an imaginary picture of any drawer, box, box within a box, box of boxes, and “locate” that a photo, accidentally taken on a Polaroid ten (or fifteen?) years ago at a bar with friends, lies in a small green box with a magnetic lid (a box from an MP3 player), inside a box with fridge magnets, inside a box of boxes.

I can mentally “open” the door of one of my cabinets, “lift” a box of junk, and “see” that down below are refills for my Japanese super-thin (0.3 mm) mechanical pencil, together with erasers next to the Victorinox knife sharpener. And the pencil itself — it’s right there, in that little pocket of my backpack; and in the neighboring one — electrical tape and pliers.

Preamble

The kryptonite of this “superpower” is moving. During packing and unpacking, the brain sees so many things, so many times, and in so many places — first trying them here, then there, because it fits better, shakes less; one box, another, all looking the same…

Unpacking — you can never unpack everything at once. First, the essentials, then searching for what you need. You see the same item again and again — here, then there, and finally in its “final” place — oh wait, no, better move it, because the kid could reach it and break it…

Such a flood of information overloads a part of the brain responsible for “where things are,” and it starts to glitch. False positives and false negatives come in droves: you think the charger is in its old place — but there’s not even an outlet there; you recall where the first-aid kit with plasters was — but it’s been moved around the room fifty times in five days, instead of sitting in its usual spot in the bathroom cabinet on the upper left (oh yes, I clearly remember where it should be — but it isn’t there)…

The Actual Problem

I don’t remember where I put my home servers.

I was absolutely sure they were in a certain spot on the shelf in the pantry — because the UPS is there now, so it’s logical I’d have placed the servers nearby.

But they aren’t there.

Moreover — I couldn’t find them. And it’s not like it’s a needle in a haystack; these are two fairly large and quite heavy boxes.

The last few moves back and forth, plus the “day X” panic — when I hurriedly disassembled and hid electronics from the flood — led to me being unable to reconstruct the sequence of my actions that night/morning/days.

Since the UPS is sitting on the shelf, it means I took everything apart, unplugged it, and put it somewhere. But where? In the big blue cabinet? Or in the drawers of the white one?… Both later had to be moved, so could I really have forgotten to take out 100+ terabytes and over a thousand dollars’ worth of hardware (not to mention the data’s value) and left it all to the movers’ discretion? No, that can’t be — that simply can’t be as long as I’m still capable of moving around. But I can’t find them anywhere.