Tourist, you gotta love them.

Some of you guys remind me of our tourist here in the Smoky Mountains.  I can just see you go into the park, oblivious of there's no cell towers, always searching for a signal your phone goes dead in record time, and not a store or filing station anywhere to be had.  We know you because you are the guy going car to car asking to borrow a charger because you didn't foresee there is actually a reason you need to make a call.  

Just last month here, a train car derailed and entire neighborhoods, over 5,000 families, were evacuated and worse nobody allowed in.  Families were separated by circumstance, hotel rooms booking as fast as the people could contact them, and that's the time you all want to go to Walmart looking for a phone charger, hopefully one your Iphone won't reject.  Dang.  Enjoy your stay at the local high school.  

On 9/11 when the first plane went into the tower, I was in an airplane landing at Chicago Ohare.  I had to hook up with a person flying in from Boston the same time, rent a car before they were all gone (got one of the last two in the lot), and tell my wife and child I was a live and well.  The entire experience was with a cell phone in my ear.  Yeah man, dropping everything and going to Walmart was high on my list of doesn't matters.  

Best of all is this "I'll never forget" attitude.  Well guess what?  The older you get the more you forget.  Your short term memory is going to hell in a hand basket and its not maybe, might, could be, but sure as hell you are going to get old.  I've never met anyone ever to say "I never forget anything" and know more people that I care to mention who have to leave home to only go back for that item they forgot or waste time stopping to buy something they have, often have numerous ones because they keep repeating the same mistake expecting somehow a different outcome.  I have no doubt the "I never forget" attitude is because you are so bad, you forgot you forget.  

What we do is create these checklists, billfold, glasses, etc.  The bigger the list, the more room for error and bigger the emergency less time we have for checklists, inventory, and stopping to buy this or borrow that.  I lived long before cell phones.  Yeah, we made it.  We learned every pay phone from here to there and back, had to stop and freeze our butts off making calls, and often left our families to wonder where the hell we are and if we are ok.  Remember its not the guy who suffers the most or barely gets by that wins, its he who barely notices it.  That's what this forum is about, barely noticing it, not just zombies and EMP blasts.  

Cell phone chargers, cords, and adaptors are dirt cheap especially on Amazon and its not difficult to figure out the man who thought ahead, bought one for his car, is better off than the guy going filling station to filling station looking for the one with the phone charger display.  I keep one in every vehicle I own, including my Harley and I have five vehicles.  If I totaled it up, I probably have $20 into the whole thing.  Guess what?  Besides my AAA card (which you'll end up walking down the interstate to call if your cell battery is dead), I have a whole list of things I have in each vehicle.  Its what we do here, prepare.  It won't be me stuck in traffic buying bottle water for $5 a bottle from the guy walking between cars.  

Survival is not about only surviving the apocalypse.   In fact, if you think of it the odds are if this happens, you won't survive.  Its about a way of life and surviving what life throws at you day after day.  Come join the team and pull your head out of the sand because Mr Murphy is waiting on that day you go out the door, your cell on red, and thinking "I'll get by".  

Tj

I think having our work phone the same as our personal phone is a handicap to many of us.  

On vacation once, I dropped mine in the lake and seriously didn't know whether to happy or sad.  That being said, not once in a weather event that knocked down trees and all lines coming to my house were down did the question of happy or sad come up.

Tj