What's the longest amount of time you spent trying to find something?

My wife lost her wedding ring in May. We eventually found it in November. We were pretty actively looking for it for the whole time. Checked all the vents. Moved the over, fridge, dishwasher, bed, washer and drier. You name it, we checked it. Eventually disassembled the sectional couch and found it under one of the sections. Which was weird because there were no gaps that it should have been able to fall through to get under there. Like, you couldn't slide a penny under the couch.

For the longest time my white whale was a meme video that could not be found online. In 2010, at the summit of Mt. Washington, I was on a camping trip with a large summer camp group. There is a tourist trap/weather monitoring facility and at the time, in the basement, was a little history exibit about the place. There was a TV in the lobby that had a clip of a video made by the meteorologists called "The Breakfast of Champions", and I wanted to see it. Only problem is that it cost 2$ to get in and teenage Bahnd had no cash.

The video consists of two of the people who worked at the facility and a very brave camera man, attempt to wait a table outside on the patio. For those who do not know, Mt Washington NH as some of the worst weather in the northern hemisphere, firstly because it is the highest mountian in eastern north america, and because they bother to write it down there. The video shows one person attemping to serve cereal+milk and toast to another guy attemping to hold down a card table & table cloth in ~140 mph winds. Footings are eventually lost and the table is blown down the mountian.

I returned to Mt. Washington, I want to say I went back in 2019, with a fresh 2$ bill (shut up, I can be weird) to finally see the video, only to find the building had been renovated and the exibit had been removed. I asked the staff and in 2017 it had been uploaded to the internet. Link to The Breakfast of Champions.

Now you all can see the meme that was almost lost to time, and I never saw until long after it was already moved online.

I've spend 30 years (as of October 2nd) looking for "BORT" novelty license plates in every gift and souvenir shop I've been in.

Mine may not be as long as some, but it was super frustrating... I lost my only car key for just shy of 1 year. This was a few years ago and was around the "end" of COVID. I have been working from home for the past 2 years, and since my car was the older one and wasn't very safe to drive I used my wife's car whenever I needed to go to the store or pick something up.

So my car sat in the front of our driveway and was ok as is. It wasn't a big deal, and at first thought ok well it will turn up soon after doing a quick search. Months later, it started to sink in that this wasn't turning up. Still no biggie, it wasn't needed and not a huge priority. Fast forward almost a year, and bam, our job is telling us we need to come back 3 days a week in 1 month... I quickly started to panick, and we both went nuts for the next few weeks, ripping the house apart, trying to find it.

I also found a cheap key fob online and decided to get it and have someone come on-site to cut the key to match the car. I felt like an idiot after that worked but realized it won't start the car because of the security in the fob that needs to sync for it to turn over the car using just the key. So, $150 later and no progress. I decided to call a locksmith, and they told me to call the car dealership because they need the codes to program one if none exist. Oh, this is also going to cost me another $200 or more... car dealership says absolutely not, I have to go there to get the codes because I need to prove it's me with paperwork since it could be someone trying to steal a car. Didn't have time for this...

So, about 2 weekends before I needed to return, I'm doing a deep clean on my wife's car since her and the kids were going to go somewhere for vacation soon. As I am doing this on the passenger side I stick my hand down the left side of the seat and boom, I hit the key fob I lost where it was stuck halfway down. We looked in her car multiple times, but due to it being stuck midway, we never really checked that and only the floor underneath...

Great! Now I know it's going to be bad trying to start the car after sitting for almost a year. Sure enough, the battery is dead and fully expected. Since it was a costco battery and got it only a few years ago, I was able to do a full return and grab another without having to pay since it needs to reach like 2 years minimum before it starts depreciation and I was a few months before that. Get the new battery in and boom! Starts right up. I get excited for a second... then I step on the brake and boom straight to the floor. At this point I'm now nervous. Luckily my father is a mechanic and he is able to spot the problem which was a pinhole opened up in the back line near the left tire. We order a new metal wire and he makes a brand new line by shaping it to match the existing one that connects across the back of the car. After a few hours success. Looks promising! Then I put it in reverse, and it goes nowhere... my father then finds the trans fluid is really low. We take a gamble and buy like 5 quarts to fill it. Seemed promising and holy crap it worked. The next day I try to go for a drive just to use it and same issue. Father comes back and realizes the fluid is basically gone again. While under the car he now realizes the entire tank it sits in was rotted out. He says this was probably the best problem to have since it was like $20 bucks to order an entire new one to replace it. Get that in the next day and fill it back up.

It has been working ever since, and I was able to make it back to work in time. That was a year and a half ago. Just for reference, the car was brand new when I brought it in Jan 2007 and has 247k on it. I am actually in the process of obtaining a replacement car finally in the next few weeks. For having the car for so long I will admit it was incredibly reliable and I put almost no money into it outside a few parts every few years like the starter or alternator which isn't bad for 18 years.

The Meaning of Life

20+ years and counting...

😑

I'll let you know when I find it.

I guess 25ish years?

There's a comedian I saw on An Evening at the Improv in the late 1980s who was doing a detective schtick.

The joke I remember is "Either this man was stabbed to death with a spoon, or his entire body is breaking out in little smiles."

I searched and searched for the clip and finally found one link, just one...

That was me having asked the same question a decade prior.

Honestly it took 21 years to find a reason to live.

However it also took 22 years to find a name I actually liked.

It won't be the longest time compared to others that commented here, nor will it be the funniest one, but it ought to be the stupidest thing one has searched for.

I spend the last couple months searching for a 1$ notebook (without any important or precious notes in it) plus the 0.50$ crystal Bic pen that accompanied it.

I don't care about these two but I also cannot understand how/where/when I lost them. It just makes no sense. So, for the last two months I've been searching everywhere, which also means searching every single one of the many streets I could have walked by (I try to go everywhere I can walking).

And, yep, I am still searching today. Maybe not as actively but I still am. And that still drives me crazy to not know what happened to them :p

On the other hand, around the same time I also lost a portable Samsung SSD drive that was worth a couple hundred. But this one I barely searched for it as I was almost certain I had mistakenly put it in bag of stuff I gave away to a charity (yep, the drive was encrypted, like all my other drives) ;)

I once had a Super Nintendo game involving a phoenix that I actually spent money in a pay phone calling Nintendo power over.

Still don’t know the name of that game and I’ve been trying to figure it out for 20 years.

At one point I thought it was guiding light

Still waiting on my dad returning with cigarettes. I hope he's ok.

Walk by Pantera. I used to play it on my Xbox 360 while I played Lost Planet back in high school and even back then I never did know the name of the song. All I knew was the distinctive riff in the song. Then, by pure chance, I heard that riff in a YouTube video nearly 8 or something years later

Oh! I was trying to find the Mozart piece o learned to pay as a kid. It was one of hundreds of minutes that he wrote. Finally found it a few months ago on Spotify! So, a few decades on that.

Also I'm looking for a recording of the episode of The daily show that featured the theft of Crimewatch signs in Northwest PA.

Doubtful it's the longest I have looked for something, but going on a month or so trying to find my baking sheet. I just want to roast some veggies damn it. How do you lose a baking sheet!?

I've spent years and years looking for a good baseball hat with just the flag or a similar symbolism of the flag of Colorado. A hat that didn't have the brim already frayed or anything else stupid on it. It took so long. I've probably been looking for 10 years at this point and only just finally got one from someone else that I made look as well. Unfortunately the hat is super cheap in materials, but it is what it is.

The title of the song Why Don't You by Gramophonedzie. I heard the song playing on radio a long time ago, probably probably around the time it came out in 2010. I didn't know the lyrics nor the artist and eventually forgot about the song. Then, many years later, I heard people saying good things about a certain Fallout: New Vegas and decided to play it to see what the big deal was. Well, the game has radio stations you can tune in and to my surprise the original song by Peggy Lee which Gramophonedzie remixed is in there. I heard it and instantly thought "...wait, could it be that song?" Well, it was, and I have to thank F:NV for that cause I don't think I'd ever have found that song otherwise.

As a child, the house we grew up in had a very large tree in our back yard. I had a memory of burying some skeleton keys near it but couldn't remember where. The house was old enough that we'd find skeleton keys occasionally and also as a kid they are special.

I searched for days, weeks, months... Digging holes all over the yard and under the tree. I recruited neighborhood kids and friends.

For two summers we searched for buried treasure. Never found them. Might have been a dream I had of burying the keys. I still think about it occasionally and wonder. The tree is long gone and the truth is I'll never know for sure.

It took me around 18 years to find the song, It's a Rainy Day by Ice MC (YouTube link), which I rediscovered last year.

My older sister used to buy a lot of different compilation albums, think stuff like "Now That's What I Call Music! (Wikipedia link)". I started listening to a lot of them, when I was around 6-7 years old, and while Eurodance songs like Rhythm Is a Dancer by Snap!, Be My Lover by La Bouche, Pump Up The Jam by Technotronic (YouTube links), and so on, were easy to track down throughout the years, there was always one song I couldn't find.
I couldn't even remember any lyrics, only that there was some rapping, where the dialect made it impossible for my child brain to absorb and retain any words. The only thing that I remembered was that there would be sentences ending with an "eh eh", and that's really not a lot to go on!

Until one day, when I was walking around a store and they started playing it over the sound system. I didn't even realize at first, but when that organ hit at 0:21, I literally snapped my head up towards the speakers, hahaha. Finding out that he was rapping in Jamaican Patois, it suddenly made a lot more sense why I hadn't retained any of the words.

Apparently they also used the song during the 2024 Paris Olympics opening ceremony (Wikipedia link), which is wild to find out.

if we're talking about consecutive time spent, ie one single uninterrupted block of time, then I'd say about 7~8 hours.

one time my ex-girlfriend's cat managed to get way. we think it was one of the roommates opened the door to the back and wasn't paying much attention. the cat was sneaky, he would try to dart out all the time

i spent the entire day, basically, walking around the fairly large apartment complex yelling out his name and shaking a bag of treats

a few hours in, my ex had a mental breakdown and gave up thinking any continued searching was hopeless. she really liked the cat and wasn't taking it well

but i just kept at it. towards the end of the day, around dusk when it was starting to get dark, i heard an exasperated meow behind me and the cat came up running to me. it looked very scared and confused.

we had just moved from one place to another a few hours away. so it was used to be an outside cat but it didn't know the area whatsoever.

anyhow it actually stopped trying to run out of the house after that, so that was nice

I borrowed a textbook from school's library, and one day, poof, just gone. I tried searching it multiple times in my house, but I can't find it. To this day, I still can't find that book, and now, it's pretty much impossible because I moved from the house

The more recent one: I tried looking for a Japanese TV show I used to watch weekly a decade ago. It should be easy, as it's a popular show, yet I can't seem to find it! The only clue I have is that I remember the show actually collaborated with Detective Conan (the anime). Yet, I tried looking at each episode of Detective Conan anime and I can't find it...

15 years, tried to find purpose of life

I spent 10 years looking for a good 2d geometry flooping paradigm.

I've been looking for a flash animation of some guy fucking a horse or cow while some kind of (Irish?) (folk?) song plays in the background. Probably only saw it once around ~2000 or so on either newground or stileproject, have been looking for it because I want to identify the song used but it's probably gone off the web forever.

It wasn't that long ago here that I spend a week looking for my favorite shirt. It wasn't in my drawer. It wasn't hanging in my closet. It wasn't under my bed or between anything in my room where it might have possibly gotten wedged. I thought I might have accidentally left it in the laundry or had it fall out of my basket walking back to my apartment. Ended up finding it buried in the back of my closet while grabbing my toolbox for some unrelated reason after giving up ever seeing again and was gonna buy a new one.