As a techie consultant, I’ve done my fair share of travel.  With the current job, most of my travel is for conducting training sessions, which are shorter duration and not as taxing… as in I don’t have to get up at 3am to make a flight to start working as soon as possible on Monday (most of the time).  Still, it’s a decent amount of travel, and over the years I’ve run across some observations.

Today, I started tossing those observations onto Twitter with the hashtag #travelnomicon to keep track of all the future ones.  Here are some observations I can recall from my past that weren’t tagged (or are probably just sitting in one of my many notebooks):

  • Don’t complain to security when you try to pass through the metal detector with more than 30 piercings.
  • If you can’t physically lift your carry-on over your head, you should probably check it instead of blocking the way hoping someone gets impatient and helps you.
  • Flyers will find you and glare at you menacingly after the flight if you apply a ton of Icy Hot just before boarding the plane.
  • Just because most military don’t have to take off their combat boots going through security, doesn’t mean you can do it too.
  • Upset about being pulled aside for a strip search? Well, blowing a dog whistle as a working dog walked by doesn’t seem as funny now, does it?
  • No matter how badly you need it, you can’t slap a prescription label on a bottle of vodka and get it through security.
  • If the girl next to you has serious motion sickness, don’t hoard your barf bag after she’s already used hers.

Sometimes, it is true… life can trump fiction.