Back in the day I used to do a lot of travel by plane but not always every week. During one of my off weeks, my partner was going to a medical training. She was going to be away for the weekend and thus didn’t need a very large suitcase, so I lent her mine.
I cannot say much about the training other than I wasn’t invited and she didn’t really have any fun stories to tell when she got home. So, I re-packed the suitcase as there was a plane that I needed to catch at 7:00 Monday morning. It was morning so I was tired and so mechanically went through the steps while trying to get to my plane, well until they wanted to xray check my luggage.
Being tired, it wasn’t important to me what they did to the suitcase, but after a few minutes it became obvious that there was some problem. This point was accentuated when they asked me to remove the knife from my suitcase. I was planning to give some sort of sharp retort except it was really early and my German wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t certain that my comment would be small enough to show my displeasure but not too large to get the rubber hose treatment in a backroom.
Besides, I have taken this suitcase a hundred times on the plane if I had a knife it would have been taken away long ago. Well, lo and behold they did find a long metal instrument that actually more resembled a pair of scissors than a knife. It was actually a clamp, which looks like a pair of scissors that when you close it locks in place.
It was obviously not mine, but I suspected it came from my girlfriend and because it came from the hospital it probably had high value. So I took the advice from the xray people at the Frankfurt airport and went down to the basement where they could hold this for a small nominal fee. I could then pick it up when I get back from my trip.
So it was a few days later that I picked up my package and went home, of course quite proud of saving this valuable surgical instrument. My attitude changed when she told me that this was not a valuable piece of medical equipment. That old thing was probably in her coat at work and it would not have been a crisis had it been confiscated at the airport.
Well, now I am terribly fond of said device so it ended up in my father’s tackle box were we can use it when we go fishing.