SOPHISTICATED ROGUE’S TRAVEL TIP* #3©

“A little OCD goes a long way.”

Being obsessive compulsive gets a bad rap. People hear you’re compelled to return to your front door in order to verify (and often, re-verify) that you’ve locked it, every single morning before you leave for work, they’ll start to look down their noses at you, and in general, checking to make sure you haven’t left the oven on when you haven’t cooked a meal yourself since that pot luck back in 2005 could be considered an unproductive use of your time. It's got a stigma, that's why it's abbreviated!

But traveling is another matter. Having a system where all of your important items are kept in the same place at all times can often save time and stress, and goodness knows, you need to save your stress!

So, I have developed a system where I put specific items in the same place before I leave every single morning. My sunglasses’s case goes in the front pocket of my day backpack. My Kindle goes in the front slot of the backpack, my laptop in the back slot. My passport goes in the same place every time I “reset” myself (No, I’m not telling you where I keep my passport, you jackals. I’m not falling for that!). So when you need to pull something immediately or, say, fifty times during the course of the day, you develop the muscle memory to do it the same way every time.

You can even make an OCD game of it - pat your hoodie pouch every hour on the hour to make sure your iPhone is still there (is doesn’t matter that you can still hear music in your earbuds, that doesn’t mean you haven’t lost your iPhone, you know!). Unzip your backpack and confirm your international adapter is still in the inside pouch at quarter past every hour. Every half-hour, check for your passport in your - OH, NO YOU DON’T.

Now you’re not an anal-retentive freak, you have a system! You’ll have some order in what is clearly a disordered world, and thus save your stress for much more important things, like “Is that drunk guy looking at me funny because he can tell I’m American, or is that drunk guy looking at me funny because he wants to fight me? And if he wants to fight me, is it because I’m American?”

I’ll start you off. Your earbuds always go in your ears.

*SOPHISTICATED ROGUE’S TRAVEL TIPS© are meant to be for entertainment purposes only. The title of the tips, the tips themselves, and in fact the sobriquet “Sophisticated Rogue” itself are meant to be ironic, wry, and in no way literal, and if you don’t know that by now, well, (sigh), Jesus, c’mon, dude…