The Crack Way to Pack

HELP! I CAN’T REMEMBER MY PASSWORDS

By Neil Offen
Columnist

So, once again we’re going to take a trip. It’s a short trip and will take just eight days. For certain people in my family — I’m not naming names here, but it’s my wife — packing for the trip will take a little longer.

I’m already packed, of course. I don’t like to brag, but as I regularly point out to my wife, I actually have a doctorate in packing. I earned it after studying with the noted soft-sided scholar Gregor Samsonite, who explained to me the importance of always first choosing a suitcase before you start packing. Then you find some stuff that will fit into the suitcase, then you sit on the suitcase to close it, then you pull hard on the zipper to make sure it’s closed and, voila, you’re done.

(The key, of course, is to never open the suitcase while traveling because stuff will tend to immediately pop out, and that could be embarrassing while you go through airport security, particularly if you have once again packed a highly pressurized inflatable clown.)

My wife, alas, does not have the same skills. This is how she packs:

First, she makes a list. Unfortunately, this is a list of everything she doesn’t want to take. Consequently, this is a very short list. It only includes dark chocolate Dove Bars.

Then, she discovers that the red top she was planning on taking doesn’t go with the blue pants, which requires that she bring the blue top as well.

But if she’s bringing the blue top, well, then she might as well bring the black scarf, as well as the green bag, the white jacket, the turquoise jewelry, the gray oven-proof casserole and another red top so the first one will have companionship.

She figures out that the white sandals aren’t appropriate with the pink dress, so she decides after all that she might need the dark chocolate Dove Bars.

She plans on taking a few sweaters in case it’s too cold. But just in case it’s too warm, she decides she’d better pack a pair of shorts, some extra T-shirts and a 3,000-BTU air-conditioning unit.

Since she can’t make up her mind whether to bring the slim paperback book or the three-volume hardback to read on the trip, she compromises by taking both of them.

After careful consideration, she adds a Turkish-language guidebook just in case we decide at the last minute to drive to Turkey instead of New England.

She chooses a suitcase then determines that it is too small.

She chooses another suitcase and determines that it doesn’t go with the red top.

In my wife’s defense, she is trying to do all this packing while I am continually and obnoxiously nagging her about her packing skills and reading out loud sections of my packing dissertation, including all the footnotes (ibid, Green Bay Packers, 1972).

It throws her off her game as she is laying out everything on the bed to see if she has missed anything that she needs to take. By accident, she packs two pillows and a quilt.

Carrboro resident Neil Offen has been a humor columnist for more than four decades and on two continents. He is the author of “Building a Better Boomer,” available wherever books are sold. This reporter can be reached at Information@TheLocalReporter.press