The Perils of Air Travel # 468

We left town last weekend and went to Florida. We're back home now, for you house burglars thinking of hitting our house, where the Doberman is always hungry for new flesh and there isn't anything to steal anyway. But on Saturday we flew to Orlando from the Philadelphia airport. At the Philadelphia airport I experienced a new thrill.

I've been getting the treatment from the TSA folks for some years now, ever since I became an old lady and thus one of the softer targets. (Hey, you haven't seen a soft target until you've watched them make a two-year-old baby take off his little white shoes to be sure he hasn't filled them with explosives.) Back in the days before everybody had to take his shoes off they used to select, oh, I don't know, every seventh person, or every helpless-looking old lady, to demand a look at that person's stocking feet. I was always it.

But this time, in a Saturday-morning mob scene of families bound for Disney World, as I put my Macbook in the tray and piled my shoes, outer garments, and one-quart plastic bag on top of it, a very cross TSA lady came and told me the Macbook had to go all by itself in a separate tray.

So, okay. I put the Macbook in a separate tray and pushed my stuff onto the rollers of the x-ray machine. A fellow beckoned to me to walk through the metal detector, and then I was required to go and stand in a box with marks where I was supposed to put my feet.

As I stood there, wondering idly whether I was being bombarded with radiation, another fellow told me that I had been randomly selected to have my laptop inspected. "Now what?" I thought to myself. Well, you know what they say, they do things differently every time to keep the terrorists off balance.

I was allowed to step out of the box. The same cranky TSA agent who had told me to put my Macbook in its own tray was returning from visiting some gizmo or other with a Macbook in her hand. "Here's your laptop," she said, and put it in a tray by itself.

I picked it up. Something didn't feel quite right. I looked at the x-ray machine, and here came an identical Macbook in its own tray. I had a feeling that the one in my hand wasn't mine. I held it up and said, rather loudly, "Is this someone else's Macbook?" None of the other travelers expressed interest. The TSA guy manning the second box said, "Just put it back in the tray."

I did this, and picked up the Macbook that had just come out of the x-ray machine, booting it up to make sure it had the wallpaper I put on it last week, Hokusai's Great Wave. Slow of wit as I am, I didn't think much about this strange mixup until I got off the plane in Orlando, when I suddenly thought, "I could have lost the Macbook," and got all goose bumps. Another day has gone by, and now I'm thinking how very queer it was that no one else seemed to want to claim the other Macbook, how very queer it was that the TSA folks wanted me to shut up about it and go away. Hmm.

Now I have a sticker on my Macbook that says Melbourne Beach, so that I will know it immediately from all the other Macbooks. I'm working on a story about Arab terrorists getting my Macbook, opening it up, muttering, "Where are the plans from Hassan?" in their heathen tongue, while I try to figure out what happened to the manuscript of my work in progress and what is all this foreign gobbledegook on my laptop.