By Angelina Ricker
Most of the flyers that go up in the Upper School are promoting plays, clubs, or SGA candidates. So it was a bit unusual when notices about a missing Needoh were posted.
For those of you who don’t know, Needohs are a kind of squishy fidget toy that the company’s website says “offer a tactile experience that stimulates the senses, making them ideal for focus, calming, or just plain fun!”
With all those benefits, it’s perhaps understandable why junior Lane Rodts was so distraught when hers went missing.
Lane purchased her Needoh off TikTok shop (not a very trustworthy shopping site if you ask me), and it came with a hefty price. Literally.
“I bought it for 50 bucks in a pack. I don’t really know why I did it, but it was calling my name, and I couldn’t just shy away,” she told me.
When Lane’s Needoh (which actually has a swirl pattern, contrary to the poster showing a plain Needoh) went missing, she contacted her group chat to inform them of her loss.
It was her friends who formulated the plan to tape flyers around the high school, hoping someone would recognize and return the lost Needoh.
“They were kind of the detectives,” Lane said, “And then the next thing I know, I was sitting in English class, and I looked outside the window, and they were hanging flyers on the hallway.”
Lane told me she was “dying laughing” when she saw the posters throughout the school, but also embarrassed at the same time. Imagine everywhere you look, in big lettering, is your name next to a stress toy, like a wanted poster in the Wild West, except there’s no prize money for the Needoh’s capture.
Lane’s friends were not the only ones determined to get the Needoh back. Once embracing the hunt for the toy, Lane made it her mission to find that Needoh.
“Needohs are rare. I can’t just be giving up Needohs, and if someone stole it, I was going to get down to the bottom of it. I was not playing around,” she said.
But the hunt didn’t last very long. After all the effort spent on making this into a high school-wide treasure hunt, the results were underwhelming and, honestly, kind of funny.
So, where was the Needoh this whole time? It was in her bag. The same bag she carries around to every class and opens in every class, and somehow she hadn’t seen it. “It was in the back pocket of my bag, but I don’t think I put it there,” Lane said. “So the mystery is: how did it get there?”
Perhaps someone had stolen it and put it back out of guilt. Or perhaps Lane simply forgot where she put it the day before. But in the end, the Needoh was back in safe hands and will hopefully not disappear again.
Lane says that her friends plan to print out new posters that explain how the Needoh has been recovered, ending the search once and for all.
“It’s just a tragic story about how consumerism is taking over my life,” Lane said, but really, I think this story shows that even the simplest problems can be solved in the most entertaining ways.
