I am currently pondering one of life’s great mysteries. No, not “Where does the other sock go?”, but the mystery of …
“Why do I have so many optics cloths, and why do I never have one when I actually need one?”
The trigger for this great musing was the occasion of my clearing off the kitchen table for the first time since … oh, probably last year when I last needed to present a holiday meal.
I do not claim to be a tidy housekeeper. I am the first to admit that my other interests – full-time medical job, part-time writing job, guns, hunting, quilting, singing, gardening, canning, and now learning to knit and spin – take higher priority than my clutter cleaning. So in my annual table clear-off I encountered not just two, but FOUR optics cloths! They have apparently accumulated there from various scopes, binoculars, and iDevices which have been opened upon the table in the past year.
I do appreciate the forethought of the various companies in supplying a microfiber swatch with which to carefully clean their optical glass. Where the failure lies is in my inability to figure out what to actually do with said swatches so that they are useful to me in the real world.
I really need to poll the audience here – is this problem unique to myself? Does everyone in the universe but me clean their optical glass carefully and religiously with the supplied microfiber cloth? If so, where do you keep it so you always have it close at hand in the field or range?
My own experience has been that when my glass is dirty, wet, or foggy, all I have available is the clean(est) corner of a dirty back pocket bandana, the sleeve of my inner fleece jacket, or the softer inside layer of my face mask. The actual microfiber cleaning cloth is at home, still in its plastic sleeve, buried on my kitchen table or in my basement gun corner. I have tried tucking one into a pocket of my pack, but it either disappears among the granola bar wrappers or I forget about it completely.
It’s not as if I don’t already have probably a hundred of such cloths scattered around my existence, and it’s not like I don’t regularly receive several as swag at gun events, it’s my lack of organizational skill that interferes between point A of possession and point B of actual use.
I started thinking about solutions to this conundrum. I could start sticking them inside the pistol grip compartment of my AR’s. But what about my non-AR platform guns with optics? Here’s the innovative idea I came up with.
I propose that companies who make scope throw levers start making those components hollow, so that one could tuck the cleaning patch inside. I’m no engineer of course, so yeah, it probably wouldn’t work. Plus, I’m then putting the onus upon manufacturers to fix a problem that is caused by my own lack of organization/planning. Yeah I know. It was just a thought.
So, what do y’all do? Anyone care to share their perfect solution with me? Or should I just sew all those patches together into a microfiber quilt and forget about it?
