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I am nearly convinced that aliens have been sneaking into my flat while I’m away, or asleep, and stealing my battery rechargers. Well, in one case I’m pretty sure it was the maintenance guy at my last apartment who swiped it, but I have bought two different rechargers since then (over two years) and the dratted things keep vaporizing into the ether.

I’ve been so careful with them, too. The good one — the one that doesn’t heat up — stays in the kitchen drawer with the measuring cups and can opener and other small, reasonably flat kitchen gadgets. The other one lives at the office, for emergency recharging of my mouse batteries.* Both have been AWOL for at least a week.

It’s got to be Martians. That, or the fact that every battery recharger I buy is a lovely matte black, and so is nearly everything else in my flat, so there’s an occasional, very slight problem distinguishing between foreground, background, and various states in between. It all just blurs into a big pile of darkness, some of it velvety, some of it satiny, some of it plastic, some of it books that are not black as such but have been overwhelmed by the darkness. Some of the darkness is enlivened by a liberal sprinkling of white dog hair, but that doesn’t really alleviate the situation; it just looks really messy.

I swear, the next recharger I buy is going to have a big splodge of neon paint splashed across it. And have a homing beacon attached. And possibly a voice-activated siren.

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*The novelty of a wireless mouse wore off very quickly, and quickly became a nuisance, to say nothing of the environmental effects of replacing an entire set of AA batteries every month, for about 100 people. I now collect dead batteries to bring into Ikea for recycling, which helps a little, but I prefer to use rechargeable ones from home. (The ones I recharge at the office only get used there, so it’s not as if I’m recharging my digital camera on the company’s kilowatt.)