Sunday, June 17, 2007

WEAPONS AND AIRPORT SECURITY AGAIN

Well that's even more stupid! I am on about that gap again... You may have read on Friday that huge shops like Boots don't sell toiletries that correspond to the crazy new airline rules, well I was wrong! They do - but only in the airport branches, isn't that clever? You try all your local stores before your holiday, you can't get what you need so you make up a bag for the hold of the aircraft unnecessarily or you decant toothpaste into old aspirin bottles etcetc only to find that the shop where they are selling it is the airport Boots at Stansted. This is completely the wrong place! By the time you are at the airport you have either given up or found and alternative solution - the Boots in the airport needs to send this stock to the local branches - come on, think about it logically! Oh and Stansted is a rip off - they are trying to charge you £1-65 for an empty 100ml bottle - you need 1 for shampoo, 1 for conditioner, 1 for suntan lotion, 1 for liquid soap, 1 for toothpaste etc - it'll be cheaper to pay Ryanair to check your handbag into the hold! And then there's rule number two - you can only have 10 bottles and they have to be in a 'resealable plastic bag'...why resealable? I saw people having bottles of the correct size confiscated because they were in a transparent bag with no sealing top, I also saw one woman have 1 100ml bottle of shampoo confiscated because it wasn't in a bag - she protested that she only had 1 bottle so didn't need to keep them together and was happy for it to go through x-ray - she was told to buy a 20p bag off the airport or bin it! Bureaucratic nonsense! Why have meaningless rules? Why was her shampoo ok in a 20p bag but not on its own? Oh and to make a mockery of all their poly bag and toiletry nonsense - when I got back I realized I had inadvertently got through the x-ray in Glasgow, Stansted and Rome carrying not one but two nail files... pretty good if you want to go for the jugular with something other than a tube of toothpaste, huh?
Actually, come to think of it, are these new rules meant to make us feel safer? We are now allowed 1 litre of liquids each, decanted into little bottles, but 1 litre all the same. I think this is to stop someone bringing on board enough chemicals to blow up the plane, no? Well, think back to 9/11 - weren't there something like 19 terrorists per plane, surely 19 litres of something lethal is enough to cause chaos? So all the queuing and checking and mountains of waste created by these new rules don't make us any safer at all, do they? Time for a rethink...

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