Finding a Needle in a Haystack Would be Simpler

Last September while enjoying our local dog park in The Springbrook Prairie Forest Preserve Miss Lily lost her collar with all her tags. Alex and I noticed as she pranced over to us her overt nakedness and scouted the area to no avail. Alex quipped at the time "Lily! Do you think we run a collar company or something and we can just whip up another collar for you?" (Yuk.Yuk.) I immediately thought...screw the collar, what about the tags?


I should mention we are blessed with a 36 acre fully fenced park with grassy areas, walking trails, tall prairie grass, trees and if you're lucky (luck being relative to if you are the dog or the person who has to clean the dog) after some rain...mud bogs. Lots of interesting terrain to cover. The next few visits I looked again in the general region she zipped around previous where I know she had her collar and then all of sudden did not. Nothing. I finally conceded defeat, reordered a new fancy name tag for $20, ordered another Home Again tag for $12 and paid my $10 to the county to get a replacement Rabies tag since you have to have one present to use the park. Good thing we get a discount on actual dog collars (ba-dum-da-dum) as the tags alone for her little collar-losing adventure added up and sadly Lily still has no credible income to cover the cost. Learning from our $42 mistake, we now leave one ID tag on the dog's collars (just in case they wander out of sight) when we go to the park with their name and our cell number on it. The Rabies and Home Again tag I clasp on their collar with a quick release loop that I remove when we enter the park. I keep it on my person in the event the Squirrel Police are checking dog park passes and rabies tags so we are legal and all and snap it back on when I leash the dogs to leave. Easy peasy and if we lose a collar again in the dog park confines I'm only out for one tag. 
I know some of you are reading this and thinking "Just get one of those cheapie PetSmart token machine ID tags-made-while-you-wait and call it a day sister." Um, hello. Have you seen our beautiful Lucky Fiona collars? Do you think I'm going to hang a crappy piece of tin on one of them? Exactly. Further you may be saying "Well the dogs are microchipped dummy, do you really need a tag ballyhooing their microchip number?" To which I say...um, I say, well, okay, I um, have nothing to say to defend that. Except I am anal retentive and think my dogs are such perfect creatures that everybody would want to steal them and I have an irrational fear of them being kidnapped by a sinister Cruella De Vil type who may just be swayed to not mess with them when they see the actual tag saying they have microchips. I know I am not the only one who feels this makes perfect sense. (am I? Hello?)


So imagine my surprise this past week to get a message on my cell phone. The caller's number was blocked as I guess they must be super important or famous and did not want me to be able to call them back. (Oprah? Have you been hanging at Springbrook with your spaniels and goldens? You have free time now.) This was the message:


"Hello. I'm at the park over here and I found your dog's collar. I'm going to put it on this tree here near where it was on the ground. Bye."


Sigh.
I listened to the message several times trying to decipher if perhaps there was some cryptic message I was missing. Nope. Pretty much the stupidest message ever. Hey genius, the dog park is 36 acres. You went through all that trouble to block your number when you called me so I think you are techno savvy enough to understand I cannot see you over the phone to know where you are placing the collar. There are many trees in a Forest Preserve, bub. The collar was lost, so indicating you are putting it on the tree near where you found it on the ground does not really assist me in locating it. 
Even more distressing is I went to the dog park that same day and in vain looked for it fully expecting to find the collar and tags. I did not. I used logic like "Maybe it's near the entrance?" and "Gee there are some picnic tables where people can sit near those trees, that's a good place to put a found object." Nothing. I looked at every tree along the main walking trails. Nothing. 
All I can say Oprah is that $42 may not be a lot to you, but it is to us poor working class Joes. You're just lucky I get the collars at cost.