TSA, Here We Go Again

About half a year ago, Diana and I went to Kansas City, MO, to attend Ben and Becca’s wedding. While we had a great time at the ceremony, the reception, spent December 31st leisurely, and then had fun at the New Year’s party, our nice getaway was marred by the strictness of a TSA inspection we had to endure.

Tomorrow, we’re flying again, this time to California. I hope bigger airports mean bigger brains when it comes to determining what couldn’t be a threat, so my brand-new 4 oz too-big tube of toothpaste may survive confiscation. I’ll probably have a score to settle when we return, but there’s one thing that I can do right now: I just bought 1-quart ziplock bags. The bags we had last time too. At the Kansas City airport, we were stripped of our bags because they were too large and were given sandwich-sized bags. So, here’s the size comparison.

This is the sandwich-sized bag with all my stuff crammed into it:
TSA-Issued Sandwich-Sized Bag With My stuff

This is just my liquid stuff I want to take aboard: deo, toothpaste, two kinds of eye drops (I wear contacts), two bottles of shampoo swiped from a previous hotel, and a bottle of contact lens cleaner:
Bought New Bags, Officially Designated “Quart-Sized”, at Store

This is a comparison of the two bags: The smaller one, on the left and on top, is the TSA-issued bag. The bottom one is the 1-quart bag I just bought that meets TSA specification. As you can see, the TSA employees took away our 1-quart bags, which were fine, and gave us new bags that were about 25% smaller:
The TSA-Issued Bag Was About 25% Smaller Than Quart-Sized

Here, finally is all my stuff, which now easily fits into the bag. I wonder if I could even throw in my 6 oz flask to make the flight a bit shorter ;)
A Quart-Sized Bag Fits Quart-Sized Stuff

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About Mathias

Software development engineer. Principal developer of DrJava. Recent Ph.D. graduate from the Department of Computer Science at Rice University.
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