Why one bag size can’t suit all
I spent yesterday afternoon on a plane somewhere between Berlin and London, surrounded by a crew of gay stewards. They served passengers ham and coleslaw sandwiches and entertained us with weird parodies of standard plane announcements.
For a while I didn’t pay any attention and continued reading the paper but after hearing that “surprisingly, out of all the places in the entire world, our captain has chosen London as his landing point” (as if we were not planning to go there to begin with), I started worrying about our safety. I thought of “The Big Brother is here to help but you have to help him too” slogans at Heathrow’s Paddington Express station, and “Terrorist’s son worked on the tube without security check” headlines from the British press, and decided that the “flying, slapstick Police Academy show” happening in front of my eyes was, to say the least, suspicious.
I had two middle-aged brothers from New York sitting next to me, one a Republican sporting a huge Texan hat and the other a more sophisticated-looking but worn-out Democrat. While queuing through the German security screening I bonded with the Democrat over our mutual dislike of Bush, hoping that the Republicans would lose next week’s mid-term election. Now, concerned about our security, I explained my worries to the Republican. He listened to me for a while and then started elaborating on the subject of the mess at European airports. The brothers, he said, had been travelling around the continent for a month, tracing their family roots and had plenty of complaints. “Europe is nice but its airports have no co-ordination regarding their security ‘can and cannot’ procedures,” he said. “They vary from one city to another, are inconsistent, make people more and more upset and more and more aggressive.”
I agreed with him and proceeded to describe my own experience. Three weeks ago I left Larnaca with a big suitcase, small rucksack and a laptop, the latter two being my hand luggage. Cypriot security staff had no comment about the quantity or size of my bags and concentrated instead on my very dangerous looking black leather belt. A week later in London it was the quantity that created a problem. British Midlands forgot to enlighten me about Heathrow’s concerns with numbers so when I got there I was told to get rid of my laptop case. I did by squeezing my laptop into my rucksack and leaving the case behind with a friend, therefore successfully decreasing the overall number of my bags.
But three days later in Amsterdam (still one suitcase, one rucksack), Schiphol airport staff didn’t like my rucksack. They told me it was too heavy so I had to re-pack its contents into my suitcase. Once I did so, my suitcase went over the baggage allowance so I had to pay extra. On top of that, the Dutch security officers questioned my shoes because they had thick soles. Luckily, they didn’t weigh them.
A week later, in Warsaw, worn out by a constant luggage hassle, I decided to make it easier for everybody and bought myself a small, wheelie bag to use as a single piece of standard sized hand luggage (I had seen people carrying them through security screenings in both Heathrow and Amsterdam with no problem so figured it would do for me as well). I was right, but only temporarily. While it was deemed OK on my departure from Warsaw, three days later in Berlin (one big suitcase, one small suitcase), the lady checking me in found my cabin suitcase a shocking concept. I told her my story and grudgingly, she agreed to accept it, but her kindness only created more problems at the security screening. Here I was asked by the staff to resort the contents of my hand luggage in accordance to what they were made and then had to put each group into a different plastic container to pass through the x-ray machine.
Exasperated, I asked them why at Heathrow they prefer to have only one bag when at Tegel it seemed to make more sense to have several. They didn’t have an answer.
Still talking to the Republican I got up, took down my small suitcase, opened it and demonstrated what I meant by this latest trouble. I took out my laptop, two tape recorders, a digital camera, two mobiles, few metres of various wires, six batteries, four tapes, two memory sticks, four floppies, coins from four different countries and three sets of keys. I also showed him a tube of Zovirax that I smuggled through all the checkpoints in my pocket.
He laughed and called the gay stewards who just finished serving the sandwiches. They bent over my wires and started creating a bomb.
