Getting connected

The French word for hip, in-the-know, is "branché", which literally means "connected". We must be branché as hell, although the hipness quotient is debatable. What I'm talking about is electrical connections.

Traveling with cellphones, laptops, and digital cameras adds bulk to your carry-on, since no one in his/her right mind would check any of those, would they? After all, you'd like have them, not give them an all-expense paid tour of every airport you're not going to. The below-the-packing-radar problem for me is remembering that we need plug adaptors for each of these items unless we want to spend a lot of time waiting around. Each of them. And I don't have enough. Oops.

We've each got a cellphone. We have cellphones for other people that we've promised to charge and use at least once to keep them operable for their owners. These are folks who aren't visiting France often enough to outsmart the seriously greedy French cellphone companies that annul your phone number if you don't use it within some arbitrary period. We've got a laptop. We've got a digital camera with a rechargeable battery.

Imagine a little line of phones and battery chargers waiting patiently at the socket for their turn to come. They're probably chatting.