After years of traveling with a small arsenal of tech — usually a phone, iPad, laptop and a portable gaming console — I like to think I'm pretty efficient when it comes to taking them out of my bag at TSA checkpoints. But it's still a pain to hastily repack them while also putting on my shoes, grabbing my belt and just trying not to hold up the line of people behind me in the process.

Going through airport security can be a little stressful, and the last thing you're probably thinking about is how to properly stow away your loose items in the plastic bins. But we should all be a little more mindful of that, especially when it comes to our phones. For one thing, chucking your phone with all your other stuff is an easy way to lose track of it as you try to rush to your next flight.

But there's also another important factor to consider about why we shouldn't leave our phones, the one device we constantly touch and put up to our face, unprotected. And it has to do with basic hygiene.

I've never worked as a TSA officer, nor do I know anyone who has, but I'm fairly confident that the bins are rarely cleaned. I can understand why: When you think about the hundreds of thousands of people who go through US airports on a daily basis, and how understaffed the TSA can be, it'd take a lot of time and manpower to disinfect the bins and feed them back to the security lines.

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