Me, in airports.

Is that an unusual amount? That describes my electronics inventory pretty accurately.

I would say several SIM cards and large storage drives probably isn't part of everyone's going-around-town bag. The rest doesn't seem TOO out-of-the-ordinary.

For me, someone who occasionally carries two laptops (bulky company-issue, light personal worktop) and a sundry of perboard assemblies that would make the TSA raise an eyebrow. But I think even that might count as 'unusual' if you're talking about the average population. How many peoples' jobs require them to occasionally have 24/7 access to their work computer? How many people carry around devices solely because they vaguely intend to tinker with them at some point, and you never know when you'll have a spare hour?

Probably less than 10%. Also, side-note, as much as I hate the TSA's security theater, I've never actually had problems with bringing things that look like bombs through security. Including a wired belt with a black box covered in electrical tape (compass)...good thing I'm white!

I have an SSD (along with a USB SATA enclosure to connect it), a spinning disk, and at least one USB thumb drive in my bag that I bring to work every day (along with my laptop).

This is in part because I switch between working from home and working at the office fairly often, have travel time in between, and need to have access to more VMs than I can fit on my laptop's internal SSD comfortably.

I also may have SIM cards rattling around somewhere; when I travel internationally, I buy a local prepaid SIM, and I may have older SIM cards left over from the last time I replaced one.

It's valid for your usecase, but I still agree with your parent comment that your bag's contents are unusual.

> and need to have access to more VMs than I can fit on my laptop's internal SSD comfortably.

Exactly the same with me, I regret only getting the 256GB internal drive with my Thinkpad but I wanted the 2560x1440 so I had to trade something off (since it's a personal machine not a work machine), I suspect I'll be upgrading it before long.

> I would say several SIM cards and large storage drives probably isn't part of everyone's going-around-town bag.

My laptop bag right now contains, 3x1TB USB3 drives, a Thinkpad T470P, an iPad Mini-2, 4-5 4-16GB thumbdrives, two phones (Nexus 4 and a Moto G5 Plus).

Not a spy, just an enterprise web developer.

I'd say most of it seems reasonable for someone traveling for business, but the SIM cards seem weird. I can understand carrying around a few phones/devices that happen to have SIM cards in them but not really SIM cards by themselves.

In some areas juggling prepaid SIMs is a good way to optimize your wireless expenses and/or maximize your coverage. You can buy phones and wifi adapters with goofy numbers of SIM slots (like 16) to facilitate this.

Huh. I've got a little SD card case with like 10 nano-SIMs in it, in my backpack now.

.. time to do some house cleaning, I guess.

Then again, I didn't break into the office I'm sitting in.

You carry two laptops, two smart phones, and two cameras on your person?

I’m sitting in a clients office right now with all of that: two phones, two computers, each phone with two SIMs, a smart watch, about 1TB of external hard drive and flash drive storage, etc. Then again I’m a traveling IT consultant. Then again (again) the guy described in the article could be me, just without my employee escort.

Where are your 2 dedicated cameras?

I used to when travelling for work. Now I have a dual-sim phone so I only carry one smart phone.

When you're trespassing?

I thought this was my office, I swear!

Depending on circumstances and numbers, hoarding SIMs might be a bit more difficult to explain than the rest.

You often carry around two laptops and a tablet? For what? And your arm muscles must be massive.