Take Pictures of the Dials of the Slab Before Leaving on Vacation
If you’re the kind of person who spends the first ten minutes of a Lyft ride to the airport worrying about accidentally leaving the oven on – even if you didn’t even use the oven that day – you can calm your anxious brain with Precautions when using a smartphone.
No, I don’t mean one of those home automation apps that tell you if your doors are locked and if the heating is on, although that’s pretty cool.
I suggest you go a little simpler: before you leave the house, take a picture of your stove and oven dial – or the thermostat, or the iron, or anything else you worry about accidentally leaving it behind. If the brain starts to play the “ Do I really turn it off” game, you can simply tap your photo app and see for yourself.
We are worried for a good reason
I started taking pre-vacation photography after my landlord upgraded the heating system in my apartment building and gifted us all new thermostats. It was in the winter, right before I left on vacation, and since the thermostats were so new that I was not yet used to them, I spent the entire first day of the trip worrying about forgetting to turn off the thermostat. …
Of course, not all of us are the kind of people who worry about these kinds of things. But for those of us who are really worried for a good reason – for example, my current oven turns off the indicator light when it reaches its preheated temperature. This means that I have left the oven on more than once, assuming it was off because none of the lights were on. Now I know to check dials, not lights.
We also worry about forgetting to turn things off, especially when we go on vacation, because the process of going on vacation is so different from our usual habits. For example, when we leave home to go to work, we usually follow a specific daily routine. We wear the same clothes and carry the same bags. We say “keys, wallet, phone,” slap pockets or check our apps to make sure we have everything we need. Then we leave the house and lock the doors.
When we go on vacation, the routine is different, the clothes are different, the bags are different, everything is different – and suddenly we cannot remember whether we closed the door, or even more so, locked it.
So I started taking pictures.
You take a photo so you don’t need it
I take pictures before long trips to make sure the oven dial is in place and the thermostats are off. The funny thing is that I never once wanted to look at this evidence after taking a picture of it; it also turns off the part of my brain that is worried about accidentally leaving something on.
Perhaps this is due to the fact that photography has become a part of everyday life. Or it may be that the process of taking a photo is difficult enough to remain in my memory – instead of taking a quick glance at the thermostat, I stop to frame the shot.
What matters is that it works. I can think about how fun the vacation will be, instead of mentally going back to my steps and hoping they stopped in front of the stove. Plus – as a bonus – if something happens to my apartment while I was away, I have photo evidence that it didn’t happen because I accidentally left the oven on or the window open.