McGarvey’s Words
by Robert McGarvey
Bag It!
|
|
McGarvey’s Words by Robert McGarvey Bag It! |
|
|
Here's What You Are Saying: Letters to McGarvey's Words . Back Pages: o Palms Away: Travels with a Palm. o Email-Country. Of Ricky Skaggs, cruising, Yahoo, and the ubiquity of email. O Google Spying: Much ado
about something good. o Ebay and the triumph of ecommerce.
|
It was in Puerto Montt, Chile where I fell in love with my bag. I was in the airport, about to board a shuttle to Santiago, when a gate attendant unceremoniously ripped my carry-on from my hands. I cursed at her in English, she presumably cursed back in Spanish, and people around me were explaining that the plane was full, there was no more space in the overheads, and my bag had to be checked. Easy for them to say. I had a week’s worth of writing on the hard drive of an Apple PowerBook, I had no backup, and I was in no position to lose that much work with a deadline staring me in the face. If travel in the cargo hold ruined the laptop, I might as well stay in Chile and take up raising sheep in the Andes, that’s how important this work was. I stoically shrugged, got on the plane, and tried meditation to keep my blood pressure down during the one-hour flight to Santiago. As soon as we landed, I rushed off the plane to scoop up my bag, I unzipped, pulled out the PowerBook and – miracle! – it booted up. I checked the file, it looked good (and of course I backed it up to a floppy, something I should have done before leaving my hotel, but who remembers such things on hectic travel days?), and for this miracle of data preservation I thanked my Atlantic Upright Virtual Office (about $150 from online vendors). For years I’ve been a luggage minimalist. Maybe cheapskate is the more accurate word. Thirty years after the fact, I actually still owned luggage my parents had given me to take to college and only a too-full moving van persuaded me a couple years ago to hand it over to the Salvation Army. Nowadays, I mainly use a 10 year-old Sharper Image garment bag (another gift from my mother) and something small and cheap to carry miscellaneous stuff. Computers I’ve generally jammed into a Land’s End cloth briefcase. But this ragtag system has seen me through decades of business traveler – then Atlantic sent me a Virtual Office and, you know what, I got hooked. This is a great bag for responding to the unpredictabilities of too full airplanes. A padded compartment holds a laptop and, as on Puerto Montt flight proved, the padding is thick enough to safely cradle a laptop no matter where the bag winds up. At 17" x 13" x 8", this isn’t a tiny bag and at 7.4 lbs it isn’t lightweight, but inside there are pockets and compartments for stowing just about everything a business traveler needs. On that Chile trip I had a tape recorder, two cell phones (different carriers; neither worked in Chile), a Palm with an extended keyboard and a modem, two cameras, three pads of paper, a handful of pens, a flashlight, a floppy disk, and there was even room for vitamins and prescription medicine, gloves, a scarf, and a wool hat (Puerto Montt and points south are a knockout gorgeous voyage into glaciers, icy seas, and more ice, meaning it’s cold, at least in the Chilean winter). I am still a luggage minimalist in that I continue to believe expensive designer and leather bags are a silly invitation for trouble, but I am liking more and more these new-breed virtual offices that let a business traveler carry-on exactly the stuff he or she needs to hit the ground running at the destination. Go ahead, misplace my garment bag. I don’t much care (assuming the bag eventually reaches me, as it always has in the past). I can get my work done in modestly wrinkled clothes. But I cannot get my work done, at least not well, without my office gear and these Virtual Offices are insurance that I have the stuff I need.. A big plus of a Virtual Office is that this all the carry-on I usually bring and, the Puerto Montt airport aside, I’ve always been allowed to bring it aboard. Even if I again encounter a way-too-full plane and the bag is snatched from my hands by a gate attendant, I’m reasonably confident that it will suffer whatever abuse baggage handlers give it and still disgorge its contents in tact. Another plus: it does not look as though it holds a laptop. Mine resembles any small, wheeled carry-on, the kinds of bags favored by flight crews. No thief, anywhere, would give my Virtual Office a second look. That’s why my advice to you is, by all means, scrimp on the bags that hold your clothes. Personally I have recently bought a deeply discounted bag from www.overstock.com. There’s no need to spend over $75 for most luggage in today’s market. But take your savings and buy a Virtual Office-type bag because this expenditure will give you peace of mind and that is a beautiful thing for any business traveler. Minimum requirements: reliable protection for a laptop (thick padding, hard sides at least for the nest where the computer sits); lots of zippered compartments for small office electronics (phones, chargers, etc.); bigger compartments for files, pads of paper; and maybe – this is optional – space for a few articles of clothing. As long as you can carry that gear aboard, what more do you need? Do you have a favorite bag? Tell us what and why and the best emails will go here. Click here to visit Joe Brancatelli's Travel Site JoeSentMe.com Keep coming back, for more of McGarvey’s Words. Copyright 2003 by Robert McGarvey Taos Land Sale: Click For Details
|
Have a cruise complaint? File it with Porthole Magazine's Ombudsman. McGarvey on Publishers Marketplace: Brain Wars About Robert McGarvey Author of How to Dotcom (Entrepreneur Press), McGarvey is writing a book on Brain Wars, the rise of cognitive science and the search for truths about thinking. A onetime columnist for BizTravel.com, he is a frequent contributor to dozens of magazines, ranging from American Legion to Electronic Business, Technology Review, and Rutgers. He has also contributed to Harvard Business Review. For the past five years, he has served as "The Ombudsman" for PORTHOLE Cruise Magazine. Still curious about McGarvey? Read up on him here. |
|
|