I HATE THAT. Either they or Air Canada couldn’t be arsed to figure out how to get my bags from Terminal 1 to Terminal 2 and I nearly missed my flight to Pittsburgh. After a long wait, my bags finally arrived, I ran through Customs and then made it to my gate to find out I had to take a twin prop to Pittsburgh. Colour me not impressed.

As some of you know, a few days before I was supposed to fly out my wallet
(and my only valid photo ID) went missing. I did some last minute scraping,
and came up with an expired drivers license and a subway card with two
stamps. I figured that that should be enough for a domestic flight, but
there were some skeptics among you that thought there might be trouble at
the airport.

It turned out that the sketchy ID was a relatively small problem. And by
relative I of course mean relative the trace amounts of nitroglycerine they
detected on my laptop! Any of you that have traveled in the last year may
have noticed that a lot of the new (and I dare say hastily hired) security
staff look like a motley cure of McDonald’s cast offs, day passers and
teenagers serving community service sentences.

Well let me tell you, they have a separate elite force for us international
terrorist suspects. In the thirty seconds it took the machine operator to
explain to me that they had detected something on my laptop, I had been
subtly surrounded by people in red badges. They were all casually leaning
on things just over an arms length away, not drawing the attention of the
other passengers by very effectively blocking all my avenues of escape.
Trying to keep the situation light I quipped “Get many false positives with
this thing?” One of the meaner looking of the bunch, I will call him Snarly
Face, said “We’ve had a thousand people go through this thing today, and you
are the only one to set it off. You must have something on you.” I started
to have visions of basement rooms and body cavity searches.

To make a long story shorter, after a chat with the Ottawa police and a
negative retest the airline rep decided that my laptop and I posed no
security threat and we were allowed to board. Warning to other laptop
owners; the police officer told me they get about 20 false alarms each week
for this sort of thing, and almost all of them are laptops. In your face
Snarly Face!

Yeah, he was a dick, but there were like six people working there, and he was the only one I saw actually dealing with the people waiting. At a rate of six people per hour, that’s infinitely more than the rest of them.

So, here’s to you prick-immigration-guy!

Now that you’re reunited here’s some places to celebrate in the usual manner.

Allen and Son Bar-B-Que 6203 Millhouse Road, Chapel Hill

Bullock’s Bar-B-Cue 3330 Quebec Drive, Durham

Maple View Farm Country Store (ice cream) 3109 Dairyland Road, Hillsborough

From an article about a ‘barbeque’ road trip through the south.

I thought about pointing out that I wasn’t going to use my several degrees to do landscaping, or whatever else illegals do. I didn’t think that agrument was going to get me very far.

Fucking Americans…