Rochelle and I took a relatively last-minute trip to LA for New Year’s, to eat at the annual private NYE dinner put on by our friend Damon’s restaurant, Cinnabar, in Glendale.
More on our adventures in upcoming postings. For now, let me just rant about Osama Bin Laden costing me my dot.bomb collector’s item Wine.com waiter’s corkscrew.
Rochelle and I always pack at the last minute, in a hurry, running around the house grabbing all the things we’ve almost forgotten to take. This time I grabbed an old backpack to carry the three bottles of booze we were taking down for dinner.
As we go through airport security, we discover that the backpack, which I haven’t used in months and months, had a waiter’s corkscrew in it, a very nice promo I got from Wine.com, back when they were still in business (we’ve been burned by not being able to open bottles of wine, and carry these corkscrews everywhere). They take that from me, and throw it into a cardboard box in the security station, where we can see the other knives, corkscrews, toenail clippers, and a spoon that have been confiscated for being dangerous weapons.
Another corkscrew, buried somewhere in my suitcase and completely forgotten, keeps me held up at the security checkpoint for another 10 minutes. We dig and dig and dig, taking more stuff out, running the case back through the security scanner, and back to digging. Finally we figure it out, a little Swiss Army knife that’s tucked into one of the small pockets of the case. That one goes into the discard box, too.
Since there’s no way for a person to reclaim these little items, I would imagine that our airport security workers are now completely outfitted with as many knives, corkscrews, toenail clippers, etc., that they could possibly use. So now most of this stuff is probably just going into the garbage.
What’s truly ridiculous is that they only found two of the three corkscrews we were unintentionally carrying. The third one got caught when we went through the security screening for our return flight, buried in the bottom of our insulated wine bag. Oops. Well, at least they found it on the second try…