Who Would Bring a Credit Card Knife on a Plane?

True story.

In the fall of 1996 my brother was flying from Las Vegas to New York to serve as the best man at my wedding. I asked my father if he wanted to make the two-hour drive with me from where we lived in the Hudson Valley area of New York to Newark Airport in New Jersey to go and pick him up.

We got to the airport in plenty of time and, this being five full years before 9/11, my father and I had the option of going right to the gate to meet my brother’s flight from Vegas, despite the fact that we were not ticketed passengers. (Remember those days??!?)

So off we went.

Until off went the security bells and whistles.

My father was pulled aside and was asked if he had any metal on him.

“Oh, it’s probably just my lucky bullet from Korea,” he said. “I carry it everywhere.”

TSA personnel looked at me, I looked at my father, my father looked like he didn’t have a care in the world. I shot him a ‘WTH?” face and then a TSA agent said, “Sir, don’t you realize you can’t carry a bullet – lucky or otherwise – with you into an airport?”

Dad: “No.”

Me: “When’s the last time you flew?”

Dad: “1953. I took a boat from Korea to San Francisco, and a plane from San Francisco to New York. And nobody asked me about my lucky bullet.”

I am reminded of that hiccup of stupidity by my father in the wake of a belch of idiocy lately regarding the world of airport security. The first, no doubt you’ve heard of already – the TSA is now banning cell phones and computers that have dead batteries and cannot be turned on for overseas flights.

This results from an intelligence plot uncovered in which members of al-Qaeda have apparently figured out how to take non-working cell phones and turn them into explosive devices.

The second is this little gem:

Now, you can debate until the cows come home the merits of the TSA’s ruling on cell phones and laptops. Maybe somebody’s flight was delayed and they ran out of power, couldn’t find an outlet, whatever. All that’s open to interpretation and, well, I’d hate to be in the security line where they decide to make everybody open and turn on their computers and tablets.

That’s a whole other story.

But the credit card knife? That’s a dangerous mistake. And yet according to the Los Angeles Times, 491 credit card knives have been confiscated by the TSA at U.S. airports so far this year. 491. That’s more than two a day.

Marketing gurus would call that a trend.

I’d call it hubris. It’s one thing for somebody to carry around a lucky bullet for 43 years and forget that it’s mixed among the change and other junk thrown into the pocket of a pair of pants. It’s another to knowingly carry on something that can cut a tennis ball in half.

Or maybe I’d call it ominous.

This is just another battlefront for the TSA to wage, like sneakers and water bottles, and it’s constantly evolving.

I can only speak for my father when I say his mistake was genuinely that. I can’t speak for anybody else who would take ANY kind of knife on a plane, much less one masquerading as a credit card.