The majority of people who travel by air recognize that security measures have been stepped up and that it is their interest to try to take steps to ensure that they are not in possession of anything that will require extra scrutiny. A few years ago, I was traveling from Canada to the USA for a weekend retreat related to my job as a coffee roaster. I chose to wear steel toed boots because I would be working around machinery quite a bit. This caused some inconvenience.

I was surprised to hear that people go to the trouble of taking home baked pies onto airplanes. This article is a first person account of the airport security gauntlet with pie.

The most surprising and ridiculous part of the report is the fact that, at one airport, a large number of pies were confiscated and then served to soldiers at the USO lounge. There were no details as to how they were reclassified from suspicious to yummy during the trip from security to the lounge. I can imagine that most of the pies were given up in haste because that is the quickest way to move on when you under scrutiny and under stress at airport security.

I like to travel without checked luggage. I had been given a small tool set as a gift from a vendor at a trade show and I hadn’t really thought about whether it would be allowed in my carry on. When a security officer told me that it was not permitted, I immediately asked him to confiscate it. In this case he strongly encouraged me to go back and check my bag so that I could keep my precious free set of tools. I didn’t want to because I knew that they were crap. I think that is why he didn’t want to confiscate them. I stood my ground and he reluctantly tossed them in the bin.