Those Freakonomics guys are always an adventure waiting to happen. Last time it was Stephen Dubner’s noodlings about routing — bus routes, not the network variety. And now his partner Steven Levitt is telling us how a quick bite of breakfast compounded by lack of sleep nearly landed him in hot water with Homeland Security. Key paragraph:
I went through TSA screening without any problem. (Not like once in the past when I got into some trouble.) Standing on the tarmac, just as I was about to board my commuter plane, I remembered that I had my sack of manuscripts in my suitcase, which I had to leave on a luggage cart because the overhead bins are so small on these little planes. So I opened up the suitcase, grabbed, the sack of JPE manuscripts, and as I pulled it out, the long, sharp knife I had forgotten completely about went skittering across the ground. The knife hadn’t seemed so ominous in my office, but in this context, with a blade about six inches long, it looked pretty scary.
Comments on the item include a number of similar air-travel tales that make one wonder why we’re bothering to wait in all those airport screening lines in the first place.
The most painful part of the entire experience, Levitt explains, was that he had “left my beloved iPod at home and would be without it for the trip.”
Remember when there was talk of banning them in the cabin? What ever came of that?
