I thought I'd necromance this thread, as an interesting thing happened last night:
I do Uber and DoorDash as a side hustle. Living in the Hampton Roads area, there are lots of bridges and tunnels to deal with. Last night, I was trying to stay on the side in which I lived, but a passenger had to go to Norfolk.
After I logged off and began heading home, there was hitch-hiker at the on ramp. Having been in situations myself where I've needed to get to the other side of bridges and tunnels that do not allow pedestrians (I've never attempted to hitch hike, though, as I'm too self-reliant), I decides to let him in, and drop him off at the first exit on the other side.
Dude was homeless and stunk to high hell, but I dealt with it.
Anyhow, I normally keep two local transit day passes on my person at all times. If he was standing at another place where a bus could be caught, I'd have handed him one of my passes instead.
So for EDC, we can talk about knives, firearms, and multi-tools all day.
But among my favorite EDC items are prepaid passes and gift cards.
I remember a time when I had just started a new job after getting out of the military (after being unemployed for 7 months, and taking a 50% pay cut), when I was living between paychecks.
For one reason or another - I can't remember why - I ended up stranded on a snowy day, and needed my wife to come pick me up because I didn't have enough money to call a cab (I don't think the taxi service was running anyway), or even the money for the premium bus service that transits between the Southside and the Peninsula of Hampton Roads. The problem was that my wife wouldn't be able to arrive for at least 45 minutes, and that's without taking the snow into account.
That's me standing in the cold and snow for at least that long, waiting for my wife.
But I didn't have to. There was a Hooters nearby, and even though I was broke... I remembered that I had a Hooters gift card that was given to me a few weeks earlier. So I went in, got out of the cold, stayed warm, and had some food while I waited for my wife to come.
I hadn't yet put two and two together yet to get into EDC, but I did release the importance of having certain things on me. And that's when I started collecting gift cards. Because that gift card saved by butt when the wrong thing happened at the wrong time between paydays. Gift cards, you could say, were my first EDC items.
I'm curious to see if anyone does the same, or has any other unusual EDC items.