Who Am I?

When you are comfortably at home with your wallet and phone and computer and file cabinet, and all is right with the world (i.e., the electricity is on), you are who you are, and you have access to your considerable resources.  Take those circumstances away – by earthquake, raging inferno, civil war, whatever – and you are just another featherless biped wandering through a hostile world.

Is there any way to mitigate the loss of personal identity and power that disaster can cause?  Probably – with a little preparation.  Many of your resources still exist – what has been disrupted is your access.  You can preserve some of that by having information at your disposal.   That means in your wallet, in your go-bag, and in the glove compartment of your car.  What, and how?

What follows is a set of considered suggestions.  Cost-benefit, risk tradeoffs, and all such things are personal considerations.  Reject the specific approaches if you wish, but consider the issues very seriously.

Here’s what I carry around – I’ll get to the where and how at the end of the list.

A piece of paper, with the following information:

Name, address phone(s) and email(s) for myself and my primary contacts (wife and children) and also for RVM.

Identification:  Social Security, Driver’s License and passport numbers
[Yabbut #1: You might get your identity stolen.  Yep – might come in pretty damned handy too.  Your risk, your choice.  Yabbut  #2: why not carry copies?  Good idea – when and where you can.  Tough to fit them all in one of those little wallet pockets, though.]

Medical Info:  Primary care physician name, address, phone. Conditions, ailments, diseases, handicaps (basically what an ER person should know before treating you for whatever got you there).  Allergies.  More if it’s important.

Medications:  Pharmacy, address, phone; prescriptions – number, medication, dose, directions.

Insurance, etc.:  Medicare #, Insurance carriers, policy #s, local agents if any.  [Yabbut #3 – see Yabbuts #1 and #2.  Same story – risk of delayed treatment or rescue vs. risk of account usurpation.  Your choice.]

Financial and Legal:  Adviser/business names & contact info.  What about account numbers etc.?  Accessing a credit card account might be really handy, but if you carry the info in writing, it’s probably best to separate the account #, the PIN, and the carrier so that the combination isn’t obvious.

How to do it?  I typed it up (Arial font 10 pt, 9 would work) and formatted the page so a two-sided printout had all the information on a piece of paper that was 4.25” x 7.75”.  Fold it in half one way and in thirds the other, and you have something the size of a business card.  I found a teeny-tiny ziploc to contain it, and fit it into one end of my tri-fold wallet next to my Medicare card.

With less compression you can fit it comfortably into go-bag or car, along with photocopies if you wish.  You can also include copies of birth/death/marriage certificates, and title information – most important things are legally recorded, so you don’t have to have the item, just an indication of how to find it.

The information counts, much more than the document – with careful formatting and copying you should be able to get everything you need onto a couple of sheets of paper – low weight, low bulk, opportunities for multiple copies.

Priceless Treasures Excavated by the Consummate Word-miner,

Tom Conger

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.  Through the Looking Glass – Lewis Carroll

For this chapter, we are indebted to Why Do We Say That?  compiled by Graham Donaldson and Sue Setterfield, Dorset Press 1989.

Put a sock in it! – “In these days of compact discs, videos and digital recordings, it is astonishing to think that only fifty years ago [1939] people used wind-up gramophones with the sound emerging from a large horn. A volume control was a thing of the future. So when Aunt Agatha complained of that dreadful Charleston noise there was only one thing to do—put a sock in it—literally.  One or more woolen socks were pushed into the horn of the gramophone to muffle the sound. Today it means, quite simply: ‘shut up’.“

load of old codswallop – “When somebody says something which is nonsense, far-fetched, or simply untrue, they are often accused of speaking ‘a load of codswallop.’  We have a certain American gent called Hiram Codd to thank for this colourful expression. In 1875 he patented a  special bottle of mineral water which became very popular—except among hardened beer drinkers.  The word ‘wallop’ was already well in use to describe alcoholic drinks and so, sneeringly, Hiram’s concoction—and other weak drinks—became known in bars as ‘Codd’s Wallop.’ Gradually, anything inferior or false became known by the single word ‘codswallop’.”

toady – “This saying is used to criticise somebody who, to further his own ends, says or does anything to please his superior.  It comes from the days of traveling medicine men in the American ‘Wild West.’ They used to sell useless potions to the public. Taking advantage of the popular but false belief that toads were extremely poisonous, the ‘quack’ doctor would get an accomplice to swallow, or pretend to swallow, a toad. He would then immediately drink one of the doctor’s potions and, much to the amazement of the crowd, walk away fit and well.”

hair of the dog – “After a party, it is not unusual for some of the guests to wake up the next morning with a hangover. The cure is said to be another drink, or ‘The hair of the dog.’  This is based on the superstition that people who are ill after being bitten by a dog can only be cured by swallowing a piece of burnt hair from the same animal. In truth, the ‘cure’ seldom works.”

rigamarole – First you do this, then you do that, then you do another thing, then…oh, what a rigamarole!’ That’s just what we call a long, involved, complicated way of doing things.  The 700-year old expression began life as the Ragman Roll, given to King Edward,I by Scottish noblemen. Each signed a deed pledging loyalty to the king and affixed his seal. The deeds were then joined together to form a document 40 feet long!  The Ragman Roll is kept at the Public Records Office, London.”

deadline – A deadline is the final time by which a job must be finished. Journalists use the word a lot [see: The Complement…]. If they don’t meet their deadline their work is useless [not going there…]—or dead—because it will have missed the edition.  The phrase comes from the American Civil War in the 1860s. A line was marked all around the wire fence of the Andersonville prisoner-of-war camp and any prisoner seen crossing the line was, without warning, shot dead.”

“A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used.”

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes