flying from London Heathrow to the U.S. with an american airline is rather cheap at the moment. “Everyday Low Fares” as UKwebsite of United Airlines announces. and the full security experience comes for free.
in fact we already met with security on the London underground. from Manor House to Heathrow is a straight line, the Picadilly line, but it takes a good while (as a number of us remember very well from when rutvica and camille were waiting at Heathrow for giulia and me, who basically left Manor House too late, to catch a flight to Athens for the ESF…). taking the promised extra security into account, we left Manor House really early. only to get stuck underground between Manor House and Finsbury park. for the longest time. morning peak hours, too many people, not enough oxygen. amazing how people responded through basically ignoring that we were standing still in a small and dark tunnel with no idea what was happening. people focused on their trashy newspapers or novels. when there finally is an announcement, we are told that there’s a fire alert on the Victoria line and that the train cannot continue. for a moment giulia and i exchange glances, there’s something strange about the Victoria line story cause basically we’re on the Picadilly line. when the train finally moves, it only takes us to Finsbury Park where it stops all together, we are advised to change to the Victoria line. stranger still. but everybody stays very calm and english-style polite. and the mass of people gathered in the station by now slowly starts filling trains on the Victoria line. once we’re on that train, we get the information that there’s a serious fire alert on the Picadilly line. this is confirmed in the other stations we have to change and pass through, so it seems that the story while we were on the Picadilly line was manufactured to keep people from panicking. it worked. it also makes you think what Picadilly fire story is supposed to do.
we get to Heathrow later than we had planned, but the long queues we had come to imagine didn’t materialize. still, the wait is longer than the queue would suggest, as every passanger has to answer an elaborate list of questions. at the end of that list i ask if it is okay to take the small container for my lenses with some drops of liquid on board with me.
– “oh no,” says the United Airlines woman decisively, “no liquids”.
– “i understand, but at some point during the journey i will need to take my lenses out.”
– “i understand, but liquids cannot go on board.”
– “so there will there be liquid for lenses provided on the plane, for passengers who need some?”
– “ah, i don’t think so,” she apologizes.
– “but this is a journey from London to San Francisco with overlay. my eyes can’t take it that long. this qualifies as special needs.”
– “i hear what you’re saying. and if these security measures become permanent, we’ll have to come up with solutions. but it’s all very new at the moment, we’re all still trying to figure it out. you know, after what happened…”
i bite my tongue not to say, after what didn’t happen…
– “and you don’t have glasses with you?”
– “no…” (a little lie for the sake of poking in their absurd security measures…)
she apologizes and suggests that i can take the container with me and ask the security people, but warns us that i mostly likely will have to leave the lenses container with them. i thank her and take up the suggestion. giulia shakes her head at this reflex to stand on my grounds and not move and keep on arguing when dealing with red tape, bureaucrazy and other official shit.
security is indeed more tight. a display of all the items you cannot take on board, it resembles the cosmetic corner in a department store. more things need to go through the x-ray, more people get body-searched. i decide not to ask anything beforehand, saving up the arguing for after the x-ray. only, that never happens cause my “liquids” pass x-ray without a problem. interesting.
but security doesn’t end here, there’s more at the gate of my flight, organized by United Airlines this time. after another passport check, all the passengers of our flight have their handluggage thoroughly checked and are being body-searched. the queue is long and once i’ve passed passport control i decide not to join the end the snake of people, waiting instead till the snakes gets shorter and one can cut through the curves. while i’m standing there, and effectively creating a second queue, a flight attendent comes to me and signals me to go through. without the extra body and luggage check. they were running out of time. thus goes the true story of how i smuggled liquids on the plane after the august 2006 non-event…
Chicago. my point of entry in the country, so this is where i need to do custums and immigration control. for some reason i have an intuition that it will be more tight, less friendly, than in San Francisco. which doens’t bother me too much, cause i react badly to the friendliness combined with this hyper-security (as you might remember). it surely is less friendly, but also less tight. well relatively speaking, after all we’re living in times of security: two digital fingerprints and a digital picture, and a new paper stappled in my passport, with the warning that i’m into trouble if i lose that piece of paper. (which i know by now.) but no extra x-ray of luggage like in san francisco.
the guy who does the prints and picture looks like a military brute. his collegue asks him something about a commercial, and he answers that he wouldn’t know, cause he doesn’t watch television. “it makes your brain rot,” he adds, and looks at me for confirmation. “oh yes,” i respond with the big smile, also to the other passport control officer, “it makes your brain rot.” “i prefer to read,” says the guy, “i read 5 newspapers a day.” if i wouldn’t get damned so nervous and uncomfortable in these security situations, i would have wanted to ask him which newspapers, i’m still curious.