Sometimes it takes radar
Tuesday January 17, 2012
Years ago, I bought this laptop from Gateway computer. They used to have a "holstein" pattern on the box, being that they were from that part of the midwest. They had kind of a folksy air to them, and you could configure your computer online and have it shipped to you. The laptop came with a very nice leather bag. I didn't use the bag too much, as I worked at home.
Lately, I have had need to hoist stuff to the office and to client sites, so I dusted off the old leather bag and used it for the last little while. Occasionally, it needed repairs, and being resourceful, I would fix the strap. The strap finally broke, and I borrowed a strap that worked nicely.
At one point, I was informed by someone with considerably more fashion sense than I that the carabiner that I had used in the latest repair was falling out of fashion.
So I ended up with a nice new bag at Christmas time. This one is a backpack, so carabiners won't work, sadly. This is a nice one, with a forest of zippers and nice compartments and velcro straps to hold laptops snugly, and places to put your pencils, like a pocket protector. Fancy.
I don't think I had ever owned a backpack, using briefcases and the Gatway bag.
So I loaded up the bag for a couple of practice runs and kind of got the hang of it, and used it for going to a client's site for a week. One of the things that I have kept in the truck was one of these nice 21-function tools so I thought I would slip that in the bag for cool points.
Well, we had a company meeting in New York, in the Fashion District, of all places (good thing I kept the carabiners at home!), and since this involved air travel, I thought it prudent to remove any manner of sharp objects. So I emptied the bag, and set aside fingernail clippers, tiny pocket knives, and such. However, I didn't see the Schrade. I searched the office, and the cars, but no Schrade.
I went again back to the now-emptied bag and looked again. You know how you look for keys in the same three places ten or twenty times, trying not to hyperventilate, because you know it has to be there, and it isn't anyhwhere else, so you keep looking? Like that.
No luck. Well, I was sure that it wasn't in the bag, and that it would turn up later.
So I get to the airport and go through the whole routine of taking off my shoes, belt (!) and putting the laptops in separate bins, and the carryon on its own bin, and the bag in its own plastic bin.
I go through the beeper without beeping it (for once) and the lady says "Is this your bag". Of course you think of some smart-aleck things to say, but she is nice and polite, so you just say "Sure".
"May I look inside?"
"Sure", thinking it is a routine check.
She is looking in the compartments repeatedly, and looking puzzled, spending maybe five minutes with her hand up to the elbow in my nice new backpack. She says "I'm going to have to run it through again."
So she takes it back through the x-ray machine and comes back and spends antother couple of minutes, and I'll be danged if she doesn't pull out the formerly missing Schrade!
How about that.
But of course you know what happens next. Since there is a blade squirreled away in this tool, you gotta leave it behind.
Next, I'll probably lose one of the laptops inside this thing.
But I do have the small satisfaction of knowing it took her a good ten minutes even with radar to find the danged thing.