Needle in a Haystack – Lost Hearing Aid Found in Paddock!
Pete was ushering some skittish cattle around a paddock yesterday, and was moving under a line of trees to get around them. As he emerged from the low branches under the tree line he realised that his valuable hearing aid was no longer where it should be. Not the cheapest of items and subsequent efforts to comb through the grass were fruitless.
This morning, I got a message from his daughter in law asking if I would be able to assist.
Hearing aids are notoriously difficult to detect as the largest piece of metal in them is the battery – about half the size of a pea, and even then the metal is only the skin surrounding the battery chemical pastes.
I said I’d give it a go, being a very recent loss.
On arrival, I asked Pete to drop his spare earpiece on the ground so I could tune in and hopefully get a tone off it.
Instantly I heard the pops and whistles of electric fence interference – Easily sorted, and he wandered away to turn the fence off. Now I was able to only just hear the sound of the hearing aid, I had the machine running so hot in order to pick up the tiny flecks of metal in the hearing aid that I was now getting interference from the neighbours fence. Have to put up with that…
Pete had marked the area where he thought they had parted company, and I gave it a quick scan although with the background interference and a ‘million’ ancient fence staples and rusting wire fragments it was mentally exhausting work analysing everything the machine was telling me.
I retraced his path back under the line of trees before circling around to where he had emerged for a real intensive scan of the likely area, on hands and knees working the coil hard into the grass to ensure I would squeeze every last bit of signal out of the aid, should the coil pass over it.
A little over an hour after I had started searching and many false alerts, I got a small but repeatable target.
I carefully picked through the grass and saw a sliver of clear silicone tubing… A big grin crossed Petes face as I held the wayward hearing aid out to him.
The proverbial Needle in a Haystack!
