Throwing money at the problem

Making your Life Easier by Throwing Money at the Problem

Okay, first off, throwing money at your problems isn’t usually the solution (unless your problems are unpaid bills, then its very effective).

However, its surprising how much difference a little thing here and there can make.

I’m talking of course about power cables.

“Power cables?!”

Right. Power cables. I have a laptop I use for work, it’s a great little shiny 13" 2.7ghz MacBook Pro. I also use Portland’s rather unpredictable public transit system. So in the morning when my brain is still POSTing, I try to keep my morning routine as streamlined as possible.

For some reason the one thing that that seemed to slow me down was winding up my laptop cable.

Realistically, there’s been a handful of times I’ve left home or work without it, but there was one time back in 2008..

I was going on a trip to Australia, I brought only my phone (which I knew would be useless once I got there) and my little first-gen Asus EeePc. I land in LA to switch planes, but due to delays leaving O'Hare, the flight had left before I ever arrived. So I was stranded in LA. I pull out my Eee and record a silly little video blog, and get online for a while. Then I realized the horrible truth.. I’d left my dammed power cable somewhere.

It turned out it’d fallen out of my bag in a friend’s car on the way to the airport. I was basically without internet, computer or phone for a week in a foreign country. Hardly the end of the world, but I’ve been a bit paranoid about power cables ever since.

So recently due to a cable issue, one of my coworkers picked up an additional cable for me, and I found another one floating around. So now I have one cable at home, one at my desk at work, and one (glitchy) cable in my bag just in case.

Now my mornings and running to catch my bus after committing that last change are easier. One less thing to worry about.

Going to the Apple store they will cost you around $80. Ouch. You can get them for less than $20 if you look though, I just looked on Google Shopping, new and used ones there.

That’s just a little something I’ve found helps me. What is something you could do to streamline your mornings?