A person goes missing: Notices appear on milk cartons, volunteers start sweeping the forest, police hold press conferences with the grieving family, somebody goes to check the cornfield where Anthony sends those who've displeased him -- you know the drill. One day in spring, "Megan" just up and disappeared. Her friends and family thought she had been kidnapped or even murdered, but there was no massive search effort or no national news circus; the cornfield went unchecked. She returned two weeks later with a much better understanding of how the world really responds when you drop off the face of the Earth.

5 Hollywood Lied to You About 'the Search'

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Two days after I went missing, my ex, Mike, called the police. The first part of their investigation consisted mainly of grabbing my laptop and combing through its contents. They browsed through my selfies, my personal writing, and my extensive hentai collection hidden in a folder cleverly labeled "Not an Extensive Hentai Collection." Mike played the devoted boyfriend just asking after his lost girl, but when the police poked around a little further and questioned my friends, they discovered that Mike and I had broken up and weren't on good terms at all. In fact, even though we lived together, Mike hadn't seen or spoken to me in the two days before my disappearance. He never had a good reason to hedge about this, but there he was, lying suspiciously like a cliche from a Law & Order episode.

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Mike suggested that I'd run away and was hiding with a friend. But my computer revealed that I hadn't signed in to any social networking accounts since disappearing, so police didn't buy this story. Those friends of mine pushed for a public missing person's report, put up fliers with my information on them, and contacted local media. There were a few scattered news stories online.

But it wasn't huge news. Not even locally. See, while a missing person's case makes for great drama in film, in reality they're just depressingly common. Law enforcement doesn't have the resources -- and people don't have the attention span -- to turn every one into a national event and ensuing made-for-TV movie starring an aging, former teen starlet.

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Due to his sudden case of crime-proceduralitis, my friends were convinced that Mike had murdered me, but they still had to act on the hopes that I could still be alive. Statistically, the odds were good that I'd either wander back into civilization eventually or be found dead in a reasonably short span of time. Of the 661,000 yearly missing person's cases, 659,000 are eventually canceled, usually for one of those two reasons. The other 2,000 presumably turn out to be games of hide and seek that just got way out of control.