Tail End Charlie

The Carpet Monster

Text: Jan Bobek

You have almost certainly experienced it. You are working on a model or figure, holding a part in your tweezers, when suddenly – ping! - the part is gone. You may still hear a sound from somewhere in the room proving that it landed, but if you have a carpet, you will hear nothing at all. Occasionally, you manage to spot the part lying on the floor during those first few seconds. But take your eyes off it for just a moment, and by the time you bend down to retrieve it, the part has vanished! In all likelihood, it has been eaten by the creature known throughout the modelling community as the Carpet Monster. It is a truly cunning and malicious beast.

The loss of a part is followed by the usual ritual: the modeller crawls around the floor on all fours, desperately searching for it - often for tens of minutes - to the great amusement or disdain of family members and household pets.

The journeys taken by parts lost in this way are truly unpredictable. Sometimes they are discovered later that same day; at other times, they mysteriously reappear several years later. Quite often, however, they vanish without a trace.

A friend once told me that he eventually found a missing part on a shelf that was considerably higher than his workbench - and relatively far away from it as well. There were no elfs in the house, so the Carpet Monster was most likely the perpetrator.

Sometimes the Carpet Monster is not responsible; ordinary physics and chemistry are to blame. I once read about a modeller whose wife helped him find a missing part during dinner. It had stuck to the skin beneath his eye, and he had not felt it at all.

The Carpet Monster can nevertheless be an extraordinarily devious creature. According to theories proposed by some modellers, it employs wormholes in the fabric of the universe. How else could we explain a modeller who never wears socks finding a missing part inside a closed drawer among his socks?

In another almost unbelievable case, a part was found on the rear side of a car outside the house - but only after the modeller had driven the car the following day! He never discovered how the missing part had escaped from his modelling room, left the house and ended up on the car.

In other cases, a part has been found in the shower or has even reappeared inside a completed model - after the modeller had made and installed a replacement. That is outright sadism on the Carpet Monster’s part.

So how can we fight this phenomenon? Playing the Muppets song with Kermit and Sandra Bullock will not help, but you will at least understand animal psychiatrist will not solve it.

Some people use a small vacuum cleaner. Unfortunately, this is of little help when a part follows a hyperbolic trajectory towards the chandelier and becomes lodged somewhere above floor level.

If using the household vacuum cleaner might cause complications, the recommended method is to stretch a nylon stocking over the nozzle. This catches the part before it disappears into the depths of a dust-filled bag perhaps containing all manner of unpleasant things.

A clean floor around the workbench is generally a good starting point if you hope to recover missing parts. Modellers with tiled floors sometimes even polish them to make small pieces easier to see. One of my friends places a flashlight directly on the floor, allowing its horizontal beam to reveal missing parts more effectively.

Naturally, a missing part will reappear by miraculous means as soon as you purchase another kit or a replacement sprue. The Carpet Monster is understandably unhappy when this happens, so it retreats into a dark corner of the workshop and spitefully loosens the cap of your glue or filler, allowing it to dry out.

I believe that the best way to prevent the loss of parts is to use a high-quality pair of tweezers designed not to double as a launching device.

I hope the Carpet Monster leaves you alone as much as possible. I have included an illustration of this mythical creature that I produced a few months ago for my colleagues at Guideline Publications. I believe it may be the first illustration of this particular species, so if anyone wishes to create a Wikipedia page - or a page elsewhere - devoted to the Carpet Monster, you have my permission to use the drawing for that purpose.

No parts were lost and no Carpet Monster was sighted during the writing of this article, although I did listen to an album by the Czechoslovak underground band The Plastic People of the Universe.