REVIEW: the ScotteVest
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I love technology. Almost as much as I love sharing my feelings about technology with anyone who's willing to listen (a dying breed). In a nutshell, I feel like technology has finally caught up with me. Almost every contraption I ever wanted when I was younger is now available.
Granted, there still aren't flying cars, but unlike most futurists, I never really saw the appeal of requiring your average driver to think three-dimensionally. I've already reached the age where I leave my blinker on for another 50 miles after changing lanes; adding "up" and "down" blinkers to the mix is just scary to me.
For the things that matter to me, though, technology has reached its zenith. I grew up in an age where TV offered three networks and four local stations on a 25" screen. If I wanted to catch an old movie that was being broadcast at 3 am, I had to set my alarm and prop my eyelids open with toothpicks to watch it. My music resided either on flat vinyl discs or cassette tapes, both which transformed into something horrible if exposed to sunlight. To contact someone when I was away from home, I could a) show up at their front door and slip a note through their mail slot (which functioned as an all-clear signal to those inside); or b) use something called a pay-phone. These devices were always located in front of a convenience store or by a gas station in the less-supervised parts of town. If you were fortunate enough to find the one out of five that worked, you usually had to wait in line until the local grass-roots pharmacist conducted his business, and then dip the handset in alcohol before you used it.
To find out how to get somewhere in my car, I used a roadmap. This was a folded-up piece of paper in my glove compartment that quickly expanded to the actual size of the city it referenced. If the map didn't work, I'd ask directions from a local. Just kidding... my Y chromosome makes me incapable of asking directions. If I couldn't find my destination, I'd spend the rest of the day trying to fold up the map until the police found me and took me home.
And of course, to do any sort of research, I had to go to a library and learn the Dewey Decimal System so I could decipher the data contained in the card-file drawers that would lead me to the book that had an index to point me to the page I was looking for... I get exhausted just recalling the process. I remember asking a librarian to show me where a book was that would teach me how to look things up. She led me to the "irony" section.
But now, there's really not much more I'm looking for in technology; the current state of the art coincides with virtually all I want from it. I can timeshift TV. I can take movies home, or have them squirted through a cable right to my house. My phone goes anywhere, and there's a little machine in my car that tells me how to get to my destination (though it still hasn't solved the blinker problem). My personal music collection is contained in a device that can fit (if not survive) in my hip pocket. And thanks to a house full of desktop and portable devices, the internet is never far from my fingertips. Thanks to the web, I've finally reached the stage of development my dad always feared I would attain: I have access to just enough information to make me dangerous.
As great as things are now, there's still a problem: what do I do when I travel and want to take most of this great stuff with me? When I'm taking a road trip, I can throw it all into a bag or directly into the trunk of my car, but that eliminates easy accessibility and having all that technology co-mingling just invites the formation of a Skynet or Colossus: The Forbin Project. Flying presents an additional obstacle. Making it through the airport security checkpoint was a challenge for me when my personal baggage consisted of 87 cents in change. Now that I have all this stuff, I usually have to allow a couple of extra days just for the quality time I'm going to spend with the NTSB.
But I recently ran across something that promises to address this problem, and I'm dying to try it out: the ScotteVest.
I discovered the existence of this amazing garment soon after I purchased my iPad. In fact, as soon as my iPad was exposed to air, it immediately Googled iPad accessories, and one of the search results was the ScotteVest website, which, in turn, was featuring the vest's iPad compatibility. Thus is the circle of commerce.
You can go to the ScotteVest website for details on their entire line of travel clothing, but the signature product is the vest, designed by founder Scott Jordan as a way to carry all his gadgets without resorting to a "man-purse". Essentially, it's a vest with about 2 zillion pockets that can serve as an extra carry-on for all your tech gear when you're flying.
I'm probably not a great example of your typical male... I'm not much into sports, or cars, or tools, or do-it-yourself projects, or anything that requires the burning of calories. But I'm acquainted with the more typical representatives of my gender, and when I enthusiastically described the concept of the ScotteVest to them, they weren't overly impressed; "Sounds like a fishing vest," they said.
Not even close. I've done some fishing... granted, I'm no good at it, and there was never a vest involved (or fish, for that matter). But for folks who are serious about it, there are vests for fishing... they're vests with extra pockets to carry the stuff that fishermen use, like hooks, and line, and sinkers, and beer, and a listing of local fish markets. There's no ingenuity to a fishing vest; someone just took a vest and slapped a bunch of pockets on it. To liken a fishing vest to the ScotteVest is like calling an abacus a laptop computer. The ScotteVest transforms pockets into an art form.
There are pockets for everything: an iPad; an iPod; a cellphone; glasses; wallet; passport; keys; airline tickets; headphones; digital camera; batteries; travel guide; e-book; chargers; business cards; memory cards; playing cards; pens; calculator; comic books; phaser... pretty much anything a traveling geek would want to carry can be slipped into this garment, and, if you believe the ScotteVest people, in such a way that it doesn't bulge at every seam.
After just a few minutes at the website, I was already having visions of a better world where I no longer had to fumble at the airport metal detector, filling their plastic buckets with enough scrap metal and circuitry to build my own ICBM. Instead, I'd shrug off my ScotteVest, kick of my shoes, take off my belt, and march through the detector with my chin up and my pants sagging.
I wasted no time ordering the vest. When it arrived a few days later, I was at the curb to take delivery, ready to open the box with my top-of-the-line 5 lb. Swiss Army Knife, for which I knew a pocket awaited.
It was not a disappointment. All the pockets were there, and I discovered even more that I wasn't aware of. In fact, I don't think there's a square inch of the garment that isn't a pocket of some kind.
Because I spare no expense for this website, I hired a professional model who was in between Calvin Klein gigs to demonstrate the vest:
In this picture, the vest is carrying an iPad; reading glasses; computer glasses; wallet; $3.55 in change; credit card holder; cell phone; extra phone batteries; Amazon Kindle; iTouch; two ball-point pens; business cards; portable voice recorder; and a box of Good N Plenties. I used to have a small point-and-shoot camera that would have fit in one of the pockets, but (as some of you might recall) I lost it at the 2009 Comic-Con, and replaced it with something that you would have seen in this picture, if it wasn't being used to take the picture. That camera is about the only gadget I own that won't fit inside the vest. When I walk, it sounds like Iron Man is taking a stroll through the house, which to my way of thinking, adds to the cool factor. I'm betting that, fully loaded, my ScotteVest will stop a bullet, which could be a consideration if they ever start issuing sidearms to the security people at the Comic-Con.
Out of the box, all the vest pockets have cards in them, suggesting what kinds of items the pocket can accommodate. So far, I've been afraid to remove those cards.
In my opinion, the neatest feature is the way you can run your earbud wires from your iPod (contained in an inside see-through breast pocket) through the vest lining, up around to the center back of the collar, then through the inside of the collar, to feed out on each side and into your ears. Like so:
I'm sure that, with my vest fully-packed, I'm generating one heck of an electro-magnetic field, but hey, Sue and I are past the point of having any more kids.
I modeled the vest for my best friend Ken. He's my best friend for a lot of reasons, but one of them is because he's never bashful about telling me what a fashion ignoramus I am. So even though I knew what his assessment would be, I couldn't deprive him of the pleasure of critiquing my latest acquisition. When it comes to gifts, he's a tough guy to shop for... and with the ScotteVest, it was like an early Christmas for both of us.
He couldn't be both kind and honest, so, as I anticipated, he opted for the more entertaining of the two options. Ken has aesthetic and moral objections to pockets of any kind. Actually, that's not entirely accurate... he doesn't mind pockets, as long as they aren't used to actually hold anything. To him, pockets are sort of like toilets; the minute they fulfill their purpose, they cease to be something you want anything to do with.
With that frame of reference, you can imagine what he thought when I modeled my pocket extravaganza. In a nutshell, he thought that I couldn't be advertising my nerdiness more, short of wrapping myself in a giant pocket protector.
Actually, I was happy with his evaluation, since I was trying to gauge the practicality of the ScotteVest rather than its aesthetic charms, and as everyone knows, there's a direct inverse relationship between fashionable and practical.
I'm going to give my vest a dry run this week at the San Diego Comic-Con, where I'll be surrounded by thousands of folks with similar fashion instincts. But the following month, Sue and I will be flying to Hawaii with Ken and his wife Deborah, and that's when the real test will take place... both for the ScotteVest and the limits of a four-decade friendship.
I'll report back on those trips. As you can tell, though, I'm already sold on the ScotteVest. I'm just waiting for their lounging pajamas that will hold all my remote controls.