For as long as I can remember, I have been obsessed with lists. I guess lists are my tool to ensure that I get everything done properly the first time and they have really served me well in life. I use them for planning vacations, trips to the grocery store and any day-to-day activity that requires some organization. Up until recently, I have been very successful creating and using lists, but after the last vacation I have come to the realization that you can miss things on a list.
I have planned countless vacations for our family over the years and I have depended on lists for each one to ensure that we didn’t miss anything. I make many lists including ones for what we are going to pack, the food that we are going to need and the places that we are going to visit. But this last vacation I was tired out from work and the crazy hours that I was putting in to meet some important deadlines for our clients. I just figured that I would be able to depend on the lists that I made previously and it didn’t quite work out that way.
The first thing that I noticed was that when I woke up to get dressed on the first day of the trip was that I had no pants. Strangely, it wasn’t just me that was missing pants and I somehow forgot to include them for everyone. I guess someone should have noticed it at home, but in our rush to get out of the house, I guess they were overlooked.
But the most serious thing that I overlooked was our visitor medical insurance. I had planned to get us signed up for the plan that we always buy each year, but somehow I forgot to include it on my lists, and therefore we traveled without insurance. That decision alone could have ended our trip abruptly, but thankfully we made it through the trip without any incidents.
Even though I have depended on lists my entire life, I have had a wakeup call with recent events that has reminded me that they are not perfect. Thankfully, we didn’t have any terrible problems because of my oversights, but I think in the future that we will try to make vacation planning more of a team effort – hopefully if we are all a little more diligent we will not have these problems ever again.