I left my ex with all I could get in a car
which I thought should be clothes, documents, computer (back when a 200MHz processor was considered a pretty nifty machine.

Having left to contract, I've had to move an awful lot

out of the 'Park' to the 'Street'
out of the 'Street' to the 'Lamb'
out of the 'Lamb' to the 'Green'
out of the 'Green' to the 'Davenport'
from the 'Davenport' to the 'Pub'
from the 'Pub to the 'Beverley'
from the 'Beverley' to the folks place
fom the folks place to the 'Crescent'
from the 'Crescent' to the 'Road'
from the 'Road' to the 'Croft'
from the 'Croft' to the 'Walk'

and here I am at the Walk.

Moiving that often tends to limit what you own to what can fit into a transit van or your car's maximum capacity and several trips to-and-from.

What I miss is, the boxes of accumulated bits, bobs, parts, components, leads, wires, circuits and various items I'd accrued in the previous 8 years which I'd kept 'for when they might be useful' and when you have a loft, you don't think anything of stashing stuff away.

there's been at least FOUR occasions when, during the last 8 years I've said 'GOD-DAMMIT!! I used to have exactly what we need in my boxes'.

Alas, chucked away 8 years ago because they couldn't fit in my car when I had to leave my ex (and wouldn't have been able to transport through the 11 moves since either...).

p.s. road names changed to protect the innocent, and to ensure the psycho bint from Up North has no chance of tracking me down....
( Rotating Wobbly Hat That's not a banana. THIS is a banana., Wed 20 Aug 2008, 20:20, 2 replies)

Some research needed, methinks
Is there a mental disorder that leaves mothers genuinely unable to tell the difference between "Random crap on the floor" and "Carefully organised collections stored neatly"?
(Big D, Wed 20 Aug 2008, 18:59, 4 replies)

There's an ace application called photorec
It's on the Knoppix live-cd and others. As long as it's in a regular file format (which it will be) you have a chance of getting soemthing off, I've been able to save a lot of data using photorec.
( Cadmus has teh uplikn coeds at, Wed 20 Aug 2008, 18:56, Reply)

My Dad throws away my love for my first guitar
I started playing guitar as a way to get out of doing university work. I practiced and became half decent and ended up going to college to study music.

My Dad seeing this decided that he was going to be the one to buy me my first guitar. It was cheap, it was shoddy. But it was something bought out of love that meant something to me. I played her all the time even when I got new, superior guitars...........

That is until the day my Dad left my Mom, leaving a note for me and my brother, meaning I (being the eldest and doing the macho shielding thing) had to inform my Mother that her husband of 21 years was leaving her for a leather faced bint from Australia.

I still have it, but I can't play it. It's the last real link to him I have considering I now refuse to have anything to do with him, but it's also a constant reminder that he cared more about not having to do his own dirty work than what it would put his (admittedly adult) children through. I may have been fully grown at the time but I assure you there are not many things more heartbreaking in the world than telling your own Mother that her marraige is over!
(Dangerous Disco Trev Isn't my real name, Wed 20 Aug 2008, 18:21, 3 replies)

My Dad threw out 1/2 my sisters wardrobe
Many a moon ago, when my sister and I were moody teenagers did this story take place.

My Dad was going round the house doing the cleaning, his current task was emptying all the bins. He ventures into my sisters room and spys a large wicker basket full of clothes.
"Ahh, she must be going through her wardrobe again"
*emptys basket into bin bag. Takes bags to the dump.
When my sister got home she got a bit frantic that all her clothes in her washing basket had disapeared and weren;t in the washing machine/ on the washing line.
Panic, revalations and recriminations ensue.

End result: My sister gets to go on a shopping spree on Dad's card. He wasn;t happy but she was.
( Crap Little Monkey Deathstar, so good they built it twice, Wed 20 Aug 2008, 17:00, Reply)

Memory Card
Jessie's story about a lost mobile reminded me.

A year ago, i got a shiny new sony ericcson flip phone from 3, and at first all was well.

However, i few weeks later, the phone stopped recognising the memory card. This was sorted by me taking the card out, putting it back in and waiting. Problem solved.

Sinse i've had this phone, i've been away to France, Spain and Germany, and i took loads of pictures with the phone and stored them on the memory card, which did stop working many times but the problem was solved by me.
Also, i took a few photos of my dog, who died earlier this year, and a couple of videos which were all saved to the memory card. I never transferred any of it to computer, as i never thought that what would happen would happen

Last week, i discovered the memory card problem again whilst trying to play some music through it. i tryed getting access to my photos to see if the problem had occured. but instead of the usual 'no files' message i got, i was treated to seeing my photos in grid form disapperaing from the screen.

i tried to fix it again using the aforementioned method, but nothing happened. i connected my phone to the computer to see where the files were, and none were there.

my phone had wiped everything from the card

I lost every photo and every video i had taken that year. every photo of spain, france, germany and my departed dog.

apologies for length, and lack of funnies.
(General_Manchego, Wed 20 Aug 2008, 16:43, 7 replies)

firing blaster cannons!
*pop*
I sometimes help out in the local charity shop where my grandma works. I'd just been on b3ta reading through a few (million) Star Wars related posts, when she rang me and asked if I would help out the next day as various other volunteers were off and she would be on her own. Being the lovely little treasure I am, I said yes. The next day, I toddle off to the shop and what's the first thing I see? Obi-wan's Jedi Starfighter (featuring an opening canopy, firing blaster cannons aaaand retractable landing gear!) complete with box, both in very good condition. Now I have no interest in Star Wars whatsoever, indeed I have never even seen any of the films (yeah? flame me) and this toy wouldn't have usually been given a second look but with the majority of this week's QOTW replies fresh in my mind, I quickly enquired 'Grandma, how much for this?' 'Oh just give us 20p, can't sell the bloody thing, been in here ages' she replied. I duly handed over my shiny 20p piece, with only one thought in my mind...that I can now come on here and tell all you whiny little buggers that your crappy plastic toys (that you have missed out making millions off!) are worth bugger all and worse, no-one even wants them!

p.s. if anyone REALLY wants it I could attempt to post it to them, otherwise it's off back to the charity shop

Length? just over 12 and a half inches
(swan'ed is all new and shiny, Wed 20 Aug 2008, 16:34, 2 replies)

Married my Mom??
When I was a teenager, on a small number of occasions, my washing would be left in my room minus certain garments. After months of hoping they would turn up I finally ask dear old Mom if she has seen it, has it gone into anybody else's pile of laundry? No answer, it is a mystery. Years later she finally admits that the garments in question, usually some scruffy t-shirt I kept because it was really very comfortable, had been thrown away by her. I guess she made an executive decision that it was too scruffy for me to be allowed to keep wearing it. Maybe not the biggest travesty of justice but it did bother me loosing things because Mom didn't like them.

Fast forward a few years, I don't live at home any more, but with my new wife. I don't rely on Mom to do the laundry anymore, in fact, as a modern-ish man I even indulge in doing some of it myself sometimes. But I have started to notice very occasionally, t-shirts going missing. And when I confront wifey, she denies throwing them away. Until a couple of months ago when I see in a shop the exact same t-shirt as I used to have. I was so happy I bought it so I could have another. Wifey cannot hold it in any longer and confesses to having thrown it away because it was.....

Too scruffy. There it is, I am sick, I've married my mother.
(crontle likes boobies, Wed 20 Aug 2008, 16:11, 6 replies)

I threw my own stuff away...
Well I had to, my baby brother who was aged about four at that time, (he is twenty five now and has just got married, but I could not go to his wedding because apparently being a lesbian at a wedding is wrong!) hid shit in my toys.

Yes, he hid shit in my toys. I even opened my money box to find two nuggets of his poo in there on top of my savings.

Since then I have always washed my hands after visiting the bank and I still hate my lying, deceitful, petty, small minded, prejudiced, little fuck head of a brother. Oh and his wife is ugly!
( Rev. Jayneflakes Buy my book, I need the cash for drugs and hookers, Wed 20 Aug 2008, 15:55, 9 replies)

I lost my mobile at the weekend
It's not a terribly expensive one, I've recently copied all of my photos into a safekeeping folder on my laptop, and what files were left on the phone weren't too embarrassing or irreplaceable.

So after the initial kicking myself for being so damn stupid (lost it whilst still hanging around at our local at gone 6am, strangely drunk after a party we kicked off about 12 hours previously) I tried to be chilled. As people have pointed out this very week on this very board, it's just possessions, right? It's a shame, but it's happened, and really I was very lucky with the limited extent of damage, so how to deal with it should be the new focus.

...the thing is, that's where I got seriously mired. I've had the same number almost since I first got a mobile and I have numbers on there for people I would now have no other way of contacting. And them me. A hell of a lot of my friendships are the enduring kind, you know the ones, you don't speak for months, sometimes years, but then you do and it's like you spoke last week :)
Sure, I've backed those numbers up before but how often do you really need it? how often does it consequently occur to you to do? My last backup is woefully out of date now, and that's assuming I could even find the little gadget they're on- we've moved long since!

What I had lost wasn't 'just stuff' it was a tool, and right or wrong it was a really important one to me. I was so sad to have lost a phone I was comfortable with, it did the job and we worked well together, but the biggest loss was a phone book I barely even thought about until I needed to call on it. Hardly even then.

Two days later someone texted my boyfriend and my mate's numbers saying they had the phone and would be dropping it off at the pub for collection that night.
You can laugh at me for feeling like bursting into tears of sheer unadulterated joy, in the middle of a food court, at the return of possession most people trade like comments on the weather, but I wont give a flying fuck.

I have my phone back :)
( Jessie © needs pirate name suggestions, Wed 20 Aug 2008, 15:53, 4 replies)

My brother threw away my future
Bit of background first:
I'm from a fairly affluent, middle-class familly. My grandparents had a butler. I went to public school. I know what a pastry fork is.

I have a brother who is four years older than me.

Due to our upbringing, both me and my brother did well at school. My brother also did okay in his A-levels and got place to read law at Southampton. And off he went. Due to fees and grants being means-tested, my parents had to support him in his studies so paid his fees, rent and a generous allowance each month.

Unfortunately, this was the first taste of freedom for my brother so all he did was drank Guiness, smoked weed and avoided lectures. He spectacularly failed first year but swore he would do better if he were allowed to resit the year, so my folks bankrolled him for another 12 months. He failed again. Next year, he would definitely pass, my parents' blue-eyed wonder boy spake once more and once more my parents funded his next twelve months.

This time, my brother used the money to fund a real ale stall for outdoor events. In Holland. Picking up a conviction for trying to import weed into the UK along the way.

My parents derailed the gravy train and home he came, to find a job.

A year after he came back, I passed my college course (my parents weren't too happy about me leaving public school and studyng with the poor, but it did me some good) and I got offered a place at Stafford Uni to study Software Engineering. Again, means testing meant that I would get somewhere between fuck and all from the government to fund my further education, but that was fine - my parents would pay.

Except they wouldn't. They said that they had wasted too much money on my brother and they wouldn't throw more away on me. So the only option was to stay in Liverpool to study. Checked Liverpool uni and the poly's - the Uni did the course I wanted but I didn't have the gardes to get in (since I did a BTEC, not A-levels) and the poly's didn't offer anything like what I wanted.

So I got a job and have worked ever since.

To be honest, it's taken some time for my lack of a degree to hold me back, but it's just starting to now.

Oh, and being the brother of a convicted drug trafficker stopped me from persuing my second chosen career of being a copper.

My wife won't let my brother in our house.
(ScousersPet, Wed 20 Aug 2008, 15:47, 10 replies)

My mum has lost all her old photos...
They haven't been thrown away though, oh no... my ex-stepdad (the same one from the toys post a few below) kept them when they split up and despite her asking several times, won't let her have them back.

Even the ones from before she met him O_o
(Professor Kenny Martin Hmm? What?, Wed 20 Aug 2008, 15:45, Reply)

I had a lottery ticket once.
Threw it away by accident. Could have been worth millions.

Damn me and my overzealous cleaning habits.
(scentless_apprentice takes two bottles into the shower!, Wed 20 Aug 2008, 14:34, Reply)

got my pay slip today
first one post the bonus/pay rise i worked my arse off to get.

the new amount of tax/NI on there is enough to make a circus strongman weep like a little girl. and i might as well have tipped it down the drain, given what cross eyed gordy will spend it on. probably a new shaker kitchen for his butler's third staff apartment or something.
( rachelswipe with a fork, Wed 20 Aug 2008, 14:14, 70 replies)

I used to have an almost-complete collection
of comics about office workers.

Unfortunately it's a crime to store comics under your bed in Mega-City One, so Judge Dredd made me throw them away.
(apeloverage committed the vile act of onanism on, Wed 20 Aug 2008, 13:53, Reply)

In preparation for future QOTW's
I had written a long, almost book length, series of adventures, mishaps, drink fuelled anecdotes, scrapes with the law and deviant sexual encounters that have taken place in my 33 years.

Not only would they (hopefully) amuse you all and endear me to you, but they might well be my meal ticket as I was considering submitting them for publication.

For safe keeping, I decided to stash them under my mattress.

Sadly, my mum came down for the day and replaced them with dog-eared smut-mags and original Star Wars figures.

Ho hum.
( sir_spicious2000 Crap I've watched: www.filmplop.blogspot.com/, Wed 20 Aug 2008, 13:47, Reply)

i took my swimming kit to the pool in a plastic shopping bag
then threw it out with the binbags that evening by mistake.

what a berk i am.
( monstrinho do biscoito teeeshurts = www.nogunarmy.com, Wed 20 Aug 2008, 13:33, Reply)

Well, since we're not exactly sticking to "thrown away"
Many years ago when I was but a mere laboratory assistant, I came home from school one January afternoon to find all my best toys had curiously disappeared. I still had some cars and things, but all the lovely shiny stuff which I'd only had since Christmas had disappeared. Obviously, as a young boy this caused me no small amount of consternation (and quite probably tears). Anyway, upon running downstairs to my mum and exclaiming "all my transformers have gone!", my stepdad (who, as you're about to discover was a bit of an evil bastard) explained that he'd in fact collected them all up and taken them to the charity shop as I'd been naughty. I can't remember what I'd done, probably gone up the stairs 2 at a time one day or something...
Anyway, as you can imagine I was fucking gutted, even though I was too young to understand those words. The world lost a little of its colour that day...

He hadn't actually given them away, just hidden them - I didn't get them back for a couple of months though O_o
(Professor Kenny Martin Hmm? What?, Wed 20 Aug 2008, 13:32, 1 reply)

My Dad
is a caring soul so when he moved into a spanking new house with my mum he decided her comic collection could go to the local childrens hospital. Only after he'd handed over the goods to countless bedridden cherubs did he bother to tell mum. His act of charity was met with stony silence then tears and then screaming. My mum had not just loved those comics but they were priceless "golden age" superman comics. Dad cried a bit then took the weeks of punishment over prying the comics out of a suffering urchins hands.
(Jumper, Wed 20 Aug 2008, 13:14, Reply)

Selling your children for fags
The "I was abused" books section in WH Smiths is getting out of hand.

Is it wrong to laugh at the title "Ma, he sold me for a few cigarettes"?

www.amazon.co.uk/Ma-He-Sold-Few-Cigarettes/dp/1845962796
( browser still relating boring anecdotes into a void on, Wed 20 Aug 2008, 13:10, 13 replies)

More
things I love that I've lost since moving to Oz.

Ham.

They can't do ham for shit over here. It's really,really, rubbish. How the fuck can they fuck ham up?

Probably the same way they fuck bacon up 'cos that's shite as well. It looks wrong (it's PURPLE), it smells wrong, it doesn't cook the way I'm used to and it tastes wrong.

And don't get me started on Aborigine art.


Then again there is a lot of things I like. Like Kangaroo meat. That's gorgeous. And the coffee is great as well. Beats UK and USA coffee hands down.
( Legless Mister Stabby - shanks for the memory, Wed 20 Aug 2008, 12:57, 24 replies)

Well... It's Wednesday
What have I loved and lost?
My sanity

Disclaimer: Not a funny story.
( Cawl, Wed 20 Aug 2008, 12:22, 5 replies)

Tenuous
.
Seeing that this is about things you've loved and lost (I'm ignoring the thrown away bit) I'll tell you what I've lost. And I didn't know I loved it until too late.

Since moving here to Oz I've had to put up with Oz TV. It's fucking dire. It's like wall-to-wall UK Gold without the good bits. And, even more a bitch, is that all the great Australian fishing programs that I used to watch in the UK aren't even show over here. The BASTARDS! No wonder it's a bloody penal colony.

Oh. And it gets cold over here. Didn't expect that.

So the thing I've loved and lost is good old British telly.

Cheers

Thank God that B3ta's international
( Legless Mister Stabby - shanks for the memory, Wed 20 Aug 2008, 12:16, 11 replies)

AARGH!!
I had a very decent genlock that my brother thought was junk.. in the bin it went.. What a dick head!
(nutellajunkie Deal with it.., Wed 20 Aug 2008, 11:37, 9 replies)

Just remembered? Or tragic repressed memory – I dunno.
Either way, this is a true story.

When I was a happy-go-lucky six year old, my ‘rents decided in their infinite wisdom to have a 'bit of a clear-up’. This organisational masterstroke included taking ALL of my toys from my bedroom and placing them in large black bin liners ‘for safe keeping’. Then, for some reason of practicality that even now I can not quite fathom, they decided that the best place to store said bin liners whilst the ‘clear-up’ took place…..was outside……by the bins…..on bin collection day.

hmmmm

At this point I’m sure your flabber will never be so gasted to discover that the chuffing bin-men (or bin ladies) promptly arrived, and proceeded to efficiently swipe the whole shebang away for disposal by way of large incinerator.

Actually……..you know………..come to think of it…….

*cogs go round in head*

Perhaps that was their plan all along. Perhaps that’s what my parents wanted to happen.

Maybe, just maybe, they were just being a complete and utter fucking shower of bastards.

What had I ever done to them? I can’t believe I wasn’t more suspicious at the time though. Damn my infant naivety!

Ah well, it’s not too late to make amends. Next time I see my mum I’m going to punch her in the throat.
(Mr Twisty Cheeky The worst kept secret in B3ta..., Wed 20 Aug 2008, 10:09, 2 replies)

Shit
Ive just remembered I left a box full of Your Sinclair, Spectrum User, Crash, Amiga Format, CU Amiga, Amiga User International and Amiga Power magazines in a load of boxes in my ex's. I told her to bin anything left that was mine.

Ah well bollocks to it.
(Miggyman, Wed 20 Aug 2008, 8:03, 13 replies)

Wednesday
Can I throw today away?
Why? Because tomorrow is Thursday!!! And we all know what that means!!! Wooo I can't wait!!! :)
(Miggyman, Wed 20 Aug 2008, 7:53, 4 replies)