Handing your check-in luggage over to the nice lady at the airport desk, you stop short and say "Oops...almost forgot!," then quickly remove the swiss army knife from the keychain in your coat pocket and stuff it in the side pocket of your bag, next to the leatherman you stored earlier. She smile patiently, automatically, and you watch your bag on the conveyor belt disappear beyond the heavy rubber flaps.
Landing in Budapest, you wait with the rest of the passengers for the baggage carousel to start. Eventually it jerks into life, and the kids have fun guessing and expecting, squealing each time a new object emerges and tumbles down the ramp. The small crowd thins as each person or couple rejoins their luggage and gear and walks away through the exit. Until you're the only one left. The excitable lady in the lost & found comes out from behind the booth with a walkie talkie in her left hand, reaching nervously toward your elbow, asking "Are you .. Kosh?"
"Yes."
"Yes. Your bag. The airport, Dublin, are not coming the bag. Please I need you fill your information."
"Okay."
She shows you a sheet of generic types of luggage, with codes next to each one, just like that last time at JFK, and the other time in Dublin.
"Please find you bag, you find here, and you say colour."
Exhausted, you try in vain, "They know they have my bag, but they don't know what it looks like?"
"Sorry I'm sorry?"
"Nothing. It's a black, grey, dark green Kelty Redwing 3100."
"Yes, thank you, sorry, it's, you say. Please to choose."
"Okay."
Later, in the hotel, you realise that of all the electronic gadgets you remembered to bring, you've forgotten the adapter for the local socket. The Irish plug is a giant beast compared to the local socket. The voltage is the same, but the puzzle is how to get the electricity out of the wall and into your devices, without tools, without tripping any circuits, and without any detectable change (i.e. without wrecking your hotel room). You brainstorm, trying to open your eyes to possibilities you aren't yet thinking of. You go through your bags and take stock of your assets: USB cables (-A, -B, mini, Samsung), house keys, handkerchief, shoelaces, velcro and elastic bands on jumper, leather belt with steel buckle. Hmm, nothing comes to mind so far. You look around the room some more at the other side of the problem: floor lamp with two bulbs with independent switches plugged in to an in-wall 3-way adapter; two bedside lamps mounted to the wall, with on-cord switches, these plugged in to a 3-way multi on the floor which is plugged in to one socket; TV cord feeds directly into back of the unit, same with the minibar fridge. You screw out a light bulb to gauge how hard it would be to feed a connection through the socket. What to use for bare wire, and how to get it to stay in place. Did you pack any PVC tape, or any adhesive at all? No, or if you did it would be in the checked in bag anyway. You take stock then, with no ideas yet, you head down to the restaurant for dinner.
Pork and cabbage and chive potatoes, with two glasses of apple juice and a bottle of water, with a local version of apple pie and vanilla cream for dessert. You stare at the plate while you dispatch your food, sometimes glancing around for items that won't be immediately missed that can be used to secure a good connection between the plug and the wall. The cutlery? Too large. The WiFi router is right next to the bar; maybe there are spare wires you could use to cut up and expose. You picture the room again from memory, focusing on the various connections in place. The lamps by the bed, they're mounted on a simple one-screw facade, aren't they? Should be one single screw on the bottom, then lift up or out from a hinge or hook on top. But how to reach inside such a small space and get at that screw? The one on the left of the bed looked more poorly mounted, maybe you'll get lucky and it's not screwed in all the way. That's the wire tips sorted, but how do you get them to stay in place, touching the socket lead ends? Clothes pins would do the trick, if they were strong enough. They probably wouldn't hang dry wet laundry in a hotel, but you saw several houses en route to the hotel where people had laundry hung out to dry on their balcony. Maybe a quick walk down the block beneath the balconies would prove fruitful.
The waiter clears your dessert plate and asks if you'd like anything else, coffee perhaps. No, thanks, just the bill. The night manager prints off the bill then walks over to you with a tired smile. You can pay cash or charge the meal to your room. So he asks "May I have your room number, please?" You reach into your pocket to take out the key to show him the number on it. Of course! You pay cash anyway, stick a toothpick behind your ear, then hurry up to the room with the solution in mind.
You check the lamp on the left, which is tilted forward slightly from the base, and sure enough the bottom screw is already loose. Lifting up the lamp at the base, the whole fixture comes away neatly. Two handy spring-lock bits hold the connections in place between the lamp wires and the lead wires; easy. However there's a white cable tie, cut short, keeping the wire from slipping through the hole in the base of the fixture. Shouldn't be a problem; Shane, at your very first festival volunteer gig, taught you how to remove cable ties without breaking them, to be used later. The tie lock is a wedge-on-tooth system, so it requires pushing the tie through its clip half way, where the wedge catch is lifted before locking into the next slot, then slipping something small in to hold the wedge catch in place while you reverse the tie back the way it came. Normally the tip of a knife suffices. Darn, you should have swiped a fork from the table after all. No matter, the toothpick behind your ear serves the task nicely.
Next is the ground wire, which is held in place by a single standard slot screw. Is a one cent Euro coin thin enough the fit in the slot? No. What else, then? There's a cheap beer bottle opener next to the electric kettle. It's hollow underneath, which provides the perfect strong edge to loosen the screw. Presto.
You take out your hotel key and your set of house keys and remove everything from the two rings. Each exposed wire end fits neatly in place around each ring, held in place by the natural ring pressure. Slipping a key into one end of each ring then twisting 90 degrees, it's the perfect width to fit over each Irish socket lead tip; twisting the key again, the keychain locks in place over the socket tip. Now, everything is in place, but the two rings, though solid enough, pose quite a risk of shorting. If you're charging the phone through the night and get up to use the loo, what's to stop you from momentarily snagging the wire and bumping the rings into each other? Or brushing your ankle near them and getting a nasty wake-up call? So, the final touch: an insulator that can fit between the two exposed rings. What makes a great insulator? Glass. You head to the minibar, and sure enough: a mini bottle of Jägermeister fits the bill nicely. You set it all up, then flip the lead switch, and the phone lights up: charging.
Note to shelf: originally the plan was to find a way to charge the laptop directly, and plug the phone in to the laptop through its USB cable to recharge that way. The Macbook adapater, with the Irish plug part removed, takes a figure-8 socket lead tip. Just after everything was set up and ready to go, I remembered my other bag, with the camera gear in it. The camera battery charger unit takes the same figure-8 lead input, and I had remembered to pack the proper Europe lead that fits the charger. This works perfectly well for the Macbook charger. Which means I was able to charge the phone directly with the diy setup. But the lesson is: always take thorough stock of your assets. Even so, the project was a success and my love of all things Keys is now extended to an appreciation for the utility of the rings that hold them together.
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