The ending is that I found the shifters in that tub, hence the photo. Couldn't have gotten the photo otherwise. Don't know how they got there or when, and I've been through that tub a couple of times since the shifters vanished. It's not so much a miracle as a mystery to me. I'm glad they turned up and will use them if they don't vanish again before I get the chance to use 'em.

I did get my buddy's bike fixed. Happy ending there, too.

Saturday evening, I was repairing a sander that had 4 propietary washers and lost 1 of them. Spent about 1hr sweeping my shop floor, then looking for the washer in the grass just outside the door, thinking it may have bounced there. My wife saw me crawling and asked me what was I looking for. I told her, she looked down and said "Is this it?". Of course it was.

I had a similar sort of happening after losing one of the precious Mafac gum-colored cable adjusters from a brake lever.
I was removing the cable housing from the cable and lever and the housing sprung outward to straighten itself by spring action. The adjuster flew off, hit the roof over my upstairs apartment landing, then dropped fifteen feet unseen onto a sidewalk below, and one more impact to a stop. Somewhere.
I hadn't seen it at all, everything in my memory was recorded sound and only recorded sound. I searched for over an hour, hit many spots around the planters many times each. Well, the customer was on his way to pick up his bike, I had explained what happened with his Peugeot PX10 Super Competition and I once more searched the entire area for a half hour until he arrived. He grilled me on the details and proceeded to look around, me following and saying where I had looked five times already.
Within one minute the young dude had found the plastic adjuster wheel.