The Findable Keyring

The Findable Keyring is a small aluminium tag about the size of a key, with one light and a very small speaker. Inside is a sensor that detects the touch of skin. The moment a hand lifts the keyring from the table, it begins to beep, glow amber and vibrate, sending neat rings of light across the room. Left lying anywhere at all, it is completely silent and completely dark.

Nobody asked for this. The real problem, finding keys you have lost, is a hard one: it needs a radio, a network, a charged battery and a phone that has not also gone missing. The Findable Keyring solves none of that. It needs a sensor and one coin cell, and the cell lasts for years, because almost all of the time the device is doing nothing whatsoever.

The instructions are admirably honest. Step one: lose your keys. Step two: search the house. Step three: when you find the keys, pick them up, at which point the keyring will confirm, loudly and with lights, that they have been found. Early reviewers described it as the most confident product they had ever owned. One called it a smoke alarm for things that have already happened. Another pointed out that it also works perfectly as a reminder that you are, at this very moment, holding your keys, in case that had slipped your mind.

The strange part is what people actually use it for. There is a particular kind of worry that goes like this: you are standing in the doorway, you cannot remember whether you picked up your keys, and your hand is already in your pocket holding them. The keyring answers that instantly. It cannot tell you where your keys are. It can tell you that you already have them, which is a different question and, it turns out, a far more frequent one.

The real thing behind the joke is that a lot of our searching is not really searching at all. It is checking. People pat their pockets on the way out, go back to test a door they are fairly sure they locked, and look twice at a hob they know is off. The worry is rarely that something is lost. It is that we cannot remember doing the ordinary thing we always do, because we did it without paying attention.

One customer wrote in to say she had stopped losing her keys altogether. Asked how, she explained that the noise is so annoying that she now hangs them on the hook the moment she gets in, purely to make it stop. The manufacturer has quietly adopted this as the product’s principle of operation, and now prints it on the box.