Notes on Account Hygiene Before You Leave

The lockout that ruins a trip is rarely a stranger on café Wi-Fi. It is a recovery email you have not opened in a year and a backup code still in a drawer in Louisiana. I do this work on the couch at home, while I can still reset a password without buying a new SIM in a language I am too tired to read.

Print the backup codes. Photograph them if you must, then put the photos in a vault you can open offline. I keep a paper card in the passport sleeve and a second copy in the password manager’s emergency kit. Codes that live only in a notes app on the same phone as the authenticator are a single point of failure dressed as organization.

Recovery email is the quiet one. If the address is an old school account, a forgotten Yahoo, or a domain you no longer pay for, you do not have recovery. You have a story. I log into that inbox before I leave. I turn on alerts. I make sure a second device can receive mail without the number I am about to leave behind.

Then I freeze what I am not using. Shopping logins. Old SaaS trials. A forum I joined for one thread. Each unused account is a reset path I will not remember when something goes wrong. Disable them, or change the password and strip the phone number. Authorized-device lists get the same pass. A laptop I sold two years ago should not still be trusted.

This is not the public-network note, and it is not the physical kit. Cables and VPN belong elsewhere. This is the afternoon of boring admin that keeps a bank, a host, and a work inbox reachable when the room changes. I do it in the week before a flight, not at the gate, because gate Wi-Fi is where people make sloppy exceptions.

Louisiana paperwork taught me to keep copies. Aotearoa immigration queues taught me that “I can get into my email” is a claim you prove, not a feeling. I treat accounts the same way. If I cannot recover them from a clean browser on a stranger’s network, I have not packed.

— JV · Dark Heart Labs.