For most of my life, numerous people – most notably my father – have poked fun at me for being disorganized.

I’ll be the first to admit that it’s a fair assessment of my life. It started in grade school, when my grandmother had the unenviable task of driving me back to school after I came home at least once a month to fetch books I needed to complete my homework.

It didn’t just end there. When I got to high school, I found myself in the office nearly every single day, asking for a rubber band to tie up my hair for basketball or cheerleading practice. You would think that ripping out innumerable hairs at the end of practice would be motivation enough to remember a real hair tie the next day — but alas, it rarely happened.

My forgetfulness and disorganization has not been limited just to academic pursuits. I’ve missed meetings and appointments, lost personal items and bounced checks. Once I even lost, canceled and then found my debit card. It was on my desk at work the entire time.

However, on Monday morning, my disorganization really came back to bite me. I got into my snow-covered car, turned on the front and rear defrosters, waited a couple of minutes, then tried to use my windshield wipers to get rid of the snow on my windshield.

No such luck, apparently. There was so much ice encrusted around my wipers that they didn’t budge.

No problem, I thought. I got out of my car, opened the back door and reached for the ice scraper on the rear floorboard. It wasn’t there.

I went around to the other side, thinking it simply migrated to the passenger side of the rear floorboard. It wasn’t there, either. Nor was it under either of the front seats.

Now, I know for a fact that I once carried an ice scraper in my car. But, once I thought about it, I realized I didn’t remember taking it out of my old car when I sold it last March, or putting it into my new car. That means that the sucker who bought my old 1996 Thunderbird got a free ice scraper out of the deal, and I was stuck in Norfolk with ice all over my car.

However, my disorganization actually came to my rescue this time. I retrieved a plastic clothes hanger from my back seat (still there from when I moved in October) and used it to scrape the ice off my car’s glass. One more item for the shopping list…