Confessions of a Baggage Screener

摘要

The suitcase was ticking. It was my third week on the job as one of 55,000 new airport screeners employed by the Transportation Security Administration, and the first day of the war in Iraq. The nationwide terror alert was at orange, and a pair of National Guardsmen patrolled the sprawling departure lobby of the US Airways terminal at LaGuardia, rifles at the ready, gas masks strapped to their thighs. All this made the egg-timer click coming from the bag, a black rolling cart with a pull-up handle, a matter of some urgency. I had picked up the suitcase after it was singled out by one of the cream-colored, SUV-sized machines that x-ray checked luggage. I put it on a metal examination table, as I had been trained to do, and swabbed the surface with a cloth-tipped wand. It tested negative in the explosive trace detector. I unzipped the bag gingerly and faced a jumble of women's clothes, mostly polyester and flowered, then stuck in a latex-gloved hand to feel for solid objects. Almost immediately I discovered an item dense enough to have been flagged as a possi-ble explosive - it was hair cream. But no clock, no bomb, and no explanation for the ticking. The sound stopped when I lifted up the bag, then started again when I set it down.