Trying to figure out any real rhyme or reason to what is likely to draw the scrutiny of Transportation Security Administration workers is the travel equivalent of rolling dice in craps: You just don’t know for sure what’s going to come up.
The MacBook Air was the latest thing to befuddle the men and women in blue, as noted across the blogging universe last month. There was at least a plausible reason for that, since the laptop — gasp — has no drives and had only recently been unveiled. Still, simple confusion seems to happen every day, as when the TSA recently targeted a kid’s sterilized feeding tube. Screeners seem to have the liquids and gels down cold, but other things truly vex them: Portable speakers, for example.
A recent post over at the blog Thank Gilligan It’s Safe For Work tells us something many of us already know: The TSA is a joke. Still, the blogger’s tale is noteworthy: He recounts recently passing through TSA screening twice with a serrated Spyderco knife tucked safely in his jacket pocket. The TSA did confiscate his large tube of Colgate and both times gave quite a lot of attention to his JBL On Tour portable speaker system, running it through bomb detection.
What gives? Who knows.
Most of us know enough these days not to bring large tubes of toothpaste and shaving cream in our checked baggage, and certainly would think to remove the small knife that we carry on our key chains. But we’d assume speakers would be safe, right? Not for sure.
Still, it’s not just TSA folks who are inconsistent in what they catch and what they miss. While I’ve never tried to get a knife on board a plane in Europe (or anywhere else, for that matter), I always travel with a single carabiner on the handle of my bag (it’s handy for securing your bag to things in places where people like to grab and run, and I just never bother removing it). I recently had a security worker try to tell me I couldn’t bring it on board a plane. He removed it and showed me how it could be used as a weapon — not unlike a set of brass knuckles. Yet he missed the other thing in my bag I always travel with, a corkscrew, something that seems a slightly better candidate to be weaponized. He eventually let my carabiner pass.
I do figure though that my corkscrew’s days are numbered.