I was two over and told that I had to remove something. Just as I was zipping my duffel open I looked at the next ticketing scale. There was a guy there who was my height but about three of me stuffed inside. Along witha suitcase and two bulging carryons!!! I turned to my ticketing agent and said something to the effect that my total weight on the plane was much less than his totAl. The reply from the steadfast t letting agent...'you're two pounds over.' No sympathy of emotion. The easiest thing to do was grab my rope bag as a carryon. Sheesh!
Then, when I got to the carryon scanner I did the shoe and laptop dance like a good road warrior. The rope bag got plopped on the conveyor and I went through the iron, not metal, detector. As I was reshoeing the scanner op grabbed my rope bag and sternly asked if the bag was mine. Yes. Then stand right there...don't leave!!! Like I was going to leave my rope!? He called a supervisor and they rummaged through the rope bag. He plopped it down, with the rope spilling all over and said ' You can go!'
Since I didn't want to hassle with the rope on another flight I asked him what the problem was.
'You have a Large Quantity of Rope!!!' In a tone that made me think it was in with knives and weapons. I said, with all the politeness Mom taught me, 'so what's wrong with that?' He said rope was on a danger list in the past but wasn't now.
OK Tom, I thought, drop it and move along.
What really concerned me was the teenager from the MN National GuArd, this is before TSA was ramped up, who was toting a mchine fun in a more casual way than my Dad would have allowed me to carry my single shot 22 cal squirrel rifle out in the woods!
Ahhh...the fun of travel! Hahahahhaha
