I’m the world’s worst when it comes to setting things down and losing them. I’m the guy who can lay a screwdriver down in the middle of a project and never see it again. I own five pairs of reading glasses and ten pairs of sunglasses, just because I lose them so frequently. Heck, one time I lost the television remote and found it two days later in the freezer! Discovering I’ve somehow misplaced a 50″ flat screen television is incredibly frustrating, but in my world, not terribly surprising.

Before I tell you how I lost a television, I need to tell you this story.

In August of 2018, I had an idea. For my home theater room, I decided I wanted a poster lightbox — a picture frame just like the ones they have at theaters that display movie posters and lights them up from behind. When I began my online search I discovered these light-up boxes are way more expensive than I had imagined — we’re talking $300-$500, which doesn’t include the posters (anywhere from $50-$100). My original idea was to purchase several movie posters and rotate them in and out of the lightbox as the mood struck me, but I quickly realized this was going to become very expensive project.

While I was doing all of this, I had an epiphany — why not go digital? Instead of purchasing a couple of movie posters, I could download thousands of them online. And instead of a physical picture frame, I could use a flat screen television that was roughly the same size. Not only would this allow me to swap posters any time I wanted, but when I ran the numbers I discovered that this solution was actually way cheaper! All I needed was images of a bunch of movie posters, a $35 Raspberry Pi, and a large flat screen television. Ultimately I settled on a 50″ Sceptre television from Walmart ($199, with free shipping). I wrote a custom script that wirelessly grabbed movie posters from my server, shuffled the order, and displayed them on the television. After downloading thousands of movie posters I spent some time weeding out ones with low resolution that didn’t look good blown up that large, and even rearranged them into different folders based on genre. Everything worked perfectly! This is what the final product looked like.

Shortly after finishing the project (which I dubbed “PosterPi”), we decided to move. Instead of mounting it to the wall at the old house, I decided I would simply wait until after we moved. The television sat in my office for two months in the old house, untouched.

The thought of movers handling my computers and flat screen televisions terrified me, so we all agreed that I would move those things before the movers arrived. All together I had seven flat screen televisions: one in each of the three living areas, one in my bedroom, one in Mason’s bedroom, one in my office, and PosterPi. The takeaway here is that each one of these televisions are unique — different models and different sizes. While they might seem interchangeable to people unfamiliar with them, I bought every one of them. I know where they came from, how much I paid for them, what brand and size they were, which rooms in the old house they came from and which rooms in the new house they were going into.

Several things happened the week we moved. The first was, I ran out of time (and steam) before the movers arrived. I moved a few of my televisions on my own, but not all of them. On moving day, the movers also moved some of my televisions, even though they weren’t supposed to. A few days after the movers were done, Susan, my friend Tim and I moved what remained in the old house over to the new house, which included the rest of my televisions. In the end, none of the televisions went into their proper rooms at the new house. Some ended up in the garage, while others ended up in the movie room.

I spent much of November shuffling televisions into their proper places. The 32″ television (which had been in my bedroom at the old house) served temporarily as our living room television at the new house, until I had time to mount the real living room television (my 70″) on the wall. The television that had been in Mason’s room ended up in Morgan’s. The television that had been in my office (hooked to all my retro computers) ended up in Mason’s room. I give the details of the televisions to reiterate the fact that each one is different. They are as unique to me as seven t-shirts, each one a different color.

I didn’t go looking for PosterPi until the weekend before Christmas. While preparing for our annual Christmas Eve gathering, I thought it might be cool if I were to download movie posters from Christmas films and display them on the television. I hadn’t thought about PosterPi since moving into the house, since I don’t really have a place to mount it yet.

So the morning of December 22, I went into my moving room looking for the 50″ television known as PosterPi and discovered it wasn’t there. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen it there to be honest, but in my mind’s eye, that’s where it should be. I then went out into the garage in search of the television. It wasn’t there, either.

“That’s weird,” I thought to myself as I searched the rest of the house. Here’s a random fact about PosterPi — because I had planned to mount it to a wall all along, I never bothered attaching a stand to it. Without a stand the television doesn’t have a way to stand up on its own, so I was pretty sure it hadn’t ended up in either of the kids’ rooms. I looked anyway. After rechecking all the bedrooms and the garage, I checked all the closets. I looked under beds. I looked in every logical place, and several illogical ones.

PosterPi is missing.

“Maybe you left it at the old house,” Susan suggested. I knew I hadn’t, but we drove over and looked anyway. Then we drove to the storage unit and looked there. The storage unit is 10’x10′ and full of plastic tubs. There’s nowhere in there for the television to hide. We then returned home and searched every place that television would fit a third time. Nothing.

PosterPi isn’t just missing. It’s gone.

(I do want to mention that both the television’s remote control and the Raspberry Pi computer behind the project both made it to the new house.)

Ruling out supernatural explanations, here are the possibilities I’ve come up with:

01. SOMEONE IN THIS HOUSE KNOWS WHERE THE TELEVISION IS. Maybe someone broke the television and won’t fess up to it. Maybe someone had an immediate need for cash and sold it. Maybe someone is okay with televisions 49 inches and smaller, and 51 inches and larger, but has a real personal problem with the 50 inch variety. I don’t really think anyone in this house knows where the television is, but if you are reading this and live in this house and know what happened to the television, please tell me. I won’t be mad.

02. THE TELEVISION IS SOMEWHERE IN THE HOUSE. Have you ever gone crazy searching for your glasses only to discover they were sitting on top of your head the entire time? It’s possible — not likely, but possible — that the television is still somewhere inside the house (or garage) and somehow we’ve overlooked it a dozen times. It’s possible a fresh set of eyes might find what all four of us have over looked, but that just doesn’t seem likely.

03. THE TELEVISION WAS STOLEN FROM MY GARAGE. So, here’s a theory — a wild one, but a theory nonetheless. When we first moved in, the garage door got accidentally left open a few times. One day, it was open from the time the kids left for school until the time I got home from work. Now, I’m not sure the television was ever in the garage — it seems like the kind of thing I would have brought into the house — and nothing else from the garage appears to be missing… buuuuut, it’s possible that someone drove by during the day, saw the garage door open, saw the television (that may or may not have been out there), and stole it, leaving everything else (including all my tools, computers, and boxes of DVDs) undisturbed. This seems as unlikely as the previous two theories, and that only leaves me with one.

04. THE MOVERS ENDED UP WITH IT. Sadly this is the most likely scenario I’ve come up with, although after spending eight hours with the moving crew, I don’t want it to be true. The most likely scenario is that the television, either intentionally or unintentionally, remained behind on one of the two moving trucks. I’d like to think that if this is what happened it was an accident, but the movers are responsible for cleaning out the trucks before they return them. I don’t think big name moving companies are in the business of taking items from people. I really don’t want to believe this is what happened.

05. ??? That leaves… “?” Maybe I loaned it to someone and then got hit on the head, causing me to forget both who I lent it to and getting hit on the head. Maybe I left it on the front lawn by accident and someone took it. Maybe I put it on the roof of the car and drove off and forgot it. You could come up with a million “maybes,” none of which seem plausible.

While none of those are great theories, the fact remains… PosterPi is gone baby, gone.

Ultimately I planned to mount PosterPi out in my new movie room, a room that doesn’t even exist yet and won’t for another six months until the workshop is built and finished. I won’t worry about replacing the television until then, which gives me a bit more time to continue my search and perhaps come up with some new theories.