Letters From The Loft
Stuff From The Desk Of Chuck Thornton
Vested Interest... page 2
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.