By Leigh Newman
Make your life a lot easier, just by having a few key details at the ready.
1. Your Mileage-Reward Credit-Card Number
Think of all those times you’ve been lying in bed late at night, ordering groceries online, only to realize that your credit card is across the room in your purse. To place your order, you will have to get out of bed. Memorizing that one set of 16 digits (plus the expiration date and that annoying 3 digit code on the back) will allow you to hit buy, stock your pantry, and move onto the 15 other things on your to-do list.
2. Your SOS Phone Number
Because all of us love our smartphones, we’ve become, well, a little dumb about phone numbers. You need to be able to spit out your mom’s phone number! Or your friend Rodney’s! Or whoever else it is who you will need to call to pick you up from the creepy auto repair shop where you’re stranded after you car mysteriously died and your battery on the phone ran out of juice.
3. Your Partner’s Blood Type
He will be unconscious after the accident. But you will be able to deliver the information to the emergency-room nurse. Ditto for his allergy to penicillin and strawberries.
4. Your Passport Number
The absolute ideal time for you to lose your passport is when you’re in the airplane just before landing, filling out customs forms on the tiny fold-down table, which is already littered with magazines and soda cups filled with dead ice. Why? You’ll tuck it in the pocket of the seat in front of you -- and exit the plane. But if you’ve got the digits pre-programmed you never have to take it out of your bag.
5. Your Child’s Social Security Number
Just imagine the day you want to open a college fund and that little yellow card is at home, filed away under Never to Be Found.
6. The Name Of The Receptionist At Your Doctor’s Office
Who do you think she’s going to choose when it comes to same-day appointments: the person on line one who doesn’t know her name or the person on line two who does?
7. The Four Lame Digits…
...at the end of your ZIP code.
If you are over 30, you will know how very lame these digits are, because wasn’t five enough? Why did the gods of the post office have to add a dash and another four? I urge you add these numbers to the annals of your knowledge. Mail will get to you faster, as soon as you share your full, correct address.
8. Your License Plate Number
There’s nothing like driving 17 hours, stopping at a motel, parking around back (to be closer to the rooms), checking in at the front desk -- only to be asked for your license plate number by the clerk. You can make up a license plate number just to avoid the hassle of trudging back to your car and figuring it out. But -- and I speak from experience -- motels tow. Even in little swamp towns in Florida.
9. 'Thank You' In Every Language
It works all over the world. You just have to know how to say it.