Bag prompts airport shutdown, evacuation
There are some fabulous quotes here, ripe for the picking.
Todd Coleman, food editor for New York-based Saveur magazine, was detained but later released after the bag was removed from the terminal and a robot opened it to disclose the contents.
Hmm. Todd Coleman. Sounds like a terrorist. I’m sure he looked very suspicious. He was probably muttering and sweating a lot. Likely had bits of food stuck to his face, and so on. I’ll bet he even had a little pen and notepad. Maybe he was wearing a t-shirt that said, “I love food and Tim McVeigh. Wanna see my jihad?”
And everyone knows that when you have a suspicious bag, the first thing you should do is call for a robot to open it up. Doesn’t matter what the bag’s owner has to say. You simply cannot trust food editors. It’s much more appropriate to shut down the airport and act super paranoid so the airlines can lose as much money as possible, and people in general can be inconvenienced for the flimsiest of reasons. You cannot professionalize unless your federalize.
Couldn’t these fools have made sure Coleman couldn’t push any buttons and then walked the bag to a safe area, and asked him to open it and demonstrate that the contents were innocuous? Excuse me, but what the hell are they teaching TSA employees? It’s certainly not how to exercise common sense.