The thing I'm always misplacing is my reading glasses. I'm a forty-eight-year-old secondary school maths teacher in Guangzhou, and I've only needed glasses for reading for about three years, so I suppose I'm still not used to them.
I lose them practically everywhere. At school, I put them down on a pile of exercise books and then someone moves the pile. At home they end up in the kitchen, in the bathroom, under a cushion on the sofa, and once, rather embarrassingly, in the fridge, next to a carton of milk. My wife still laughs about that.
Finding them again usually involves a lot of wandering around the house saying, "Has anyone seen my glasses?" My teenage son has become an expert. He just looks at me and says, "Check your head," and quite often they're sitting on top of my hair. At school, my students sometimes find them for me and bring them to my desk, which is quite humiliating for a teacher.
I think there are a few reasons why I keep losing them. Firstly, I only need them for close work, so I'm constantly taking them on and off throughout the day, maybe fifty times. Each time, I put them down without thinking. Secondly, I'm usually doing two things at once, like marking work while answering a question, so my attention is elsewhere. And thirdly, I've never given them a proper home. I've now bought three cheap pairs, one for the classroom, one for the kitchen and one for my bag, which has helped a lot, although I sometimes find all three in the same room.