Cables and travelling

The modern traveller, and especially the modern business traveller, travels with quite a collection of electrical applicances: razor, laptop computer, cellphone, organizer, walkman... And all those appliances have cables. Some only have a power supply to charge the batteries, others have many more wires.

You can, of course, throw those wires in the suitcase just as they are. If the suitcase is large enough it makes for fast packing. But not unpacking: everything tangled.

With more discipline and foresight you can also make neat rolls of the wires, bind them with a rubberband or a piece of iron wire, and only then put them in the suitcase. It will save a lot of time when it comes to unpacking again.

A problem is that those rubberbands and iron wires always get lost. Some people, including me, therefore have adopted the habit to attach those little tools to the cables after they have been unwinded. That works marvellously: the iron wire for the earphones can be found around the earphone wire, the rubberband for the ethernet cable sits around the ethernet cable and the clip for the modem cable is found around the modem cable. Everything neatly arranged and no more searching when you're packing.

... until you lend a cable to a colleague. Ten to one that you get the cable back, but not the iron wire.