Ahh, the life of a man in a suitcase. Exotic locations, exciting hotels, and all that fun frequent flying! Oh the glamour!

Yeah, right! As if constant delays due to broken airplanes and lost flight crews aren’t enough to drive a person insane, now almost every week those Thoughtful, Sweet Allies at the TSA take the time to thoroughly inspect my luggage for contraband and/or valuables. In return for pilfering all the shiny objects from my bag, they usually leave me with this notice:

Since the Trouble Staying Awake folks banned nearly everything a few weeks ago, they’ve gone a little nuts searching suitcases. I find at least two of these handy ‘Notice of Baggage Inspection’ leaflets a week littering my luggage. In a pinch, I have used them as kindling, note paper, and a napkin. They’d probably work well as toilet paper, though I haven’t tried it (yet).

After hitting both ends of the internet the other day, I was so bored I almost watched some baseball. The key word there is ALMOST. I was saved from that fate when I noticed one of theses notices doubling as a coaster for my beer.

Another use for these brochures I hadn’t considered is actually reading them. Anything that saves me from watching baseball is a good thing. As I soon found out, the little leaflets actually contain some pretty interesting stuff. A few things really stood out to me. First:

So THAT’S what they do! They look for prohibited (read: expensive) items, rigorously test them to see if they fit the weekly banned items profile (read: have charged batteries and or songs the screener likes on them) then supposedly just… return them. Riiiight. Well, if the end result is just putting everything back, what is the point of all this hype then? Are they just nosy or something?

Second:

Well, isn’t that nice? The Thugs Stealing All ‘sincerely regret‘ having to cut locks off of luggage to look for Ipods and other goodies they can give to each other as Christmas gifts. I also like the fact that since The Supreme Authority state they ‘aren’t liable for damage’ to locks that THEY CUT OFF, it’s just OK.

Using Those Slimy Airhead’s own logic, I want to state the following: “I sincerely regret that some blog posts, (Editor’s note: like this one for example), may suck. Even though I wrote them, it’s not my fault.”

And finally:

As everyone knows, Smart Security Saves Time. I suppose ‘saving time‘ is something for security to be proud of. But wouldn’t a better line be ‘Good Security Saves Lives‘?

Author: frenchy