Sometimes the desire to save money gives rise to truly ingenious ideas.
And sometimes — stories that later have to be retold on the news.
On 14 September in Wisconsin, a passenger decided not to pay about $100 for checked baggage for the sake of a single tourist knife worth roughly $5.
The logic was ironclad:
why pay a hundred dollars if you can simply tape the knife inside your carry-on and go through security?
The plan was not bad.
If you forget one small detail:
airports have X-rays.
TSA officers noticed the hidden knife quite quickly.
That is, the tape worked perfectly.
It really did hold the knife in place.
It just, for some reason, failed to protect it from the X-ray.
The woman explained that she was going hiking and did not want to part with the knife, but paying for separate baggage seemed too expensive to her.
In the end, the knife had to be left behind.
And all the savings boiled down to rather strange math:
save $100, lose an item worth $5, and gain a story that the internet is now discussing.
The most wonderful thing here is not even the knife itself.
And the belief that if you tape an object really well to your bag, the airport equipment will suddenly say:
"Well, all right, I didn't notice this one."
So the main takeaway from the story is simple:
X-rays can still see through bags.
Even if you tape them up very, very well. 😄
