I’ll take basic toiletries for 100…

Today was my first day traveling since the Christmas attack. Some on flyertalk had reported issues with generic bottles at checkpoints so in addition to that I made sure stop using my 4 oz (shh!) generic bottles and clean out various old boarding passes and other junk from my bag to prevent too many reasons for a bag check. I also considered checking my bag, but I was on a 2 airline 3 leg trip so I didn’t want to risk checking it and carried on. It helped that the lines were fairly short due to this being the post-holiday travel lull and many other business travelers didn’t seem to be traveling today.

I got to the checkpoint, prepared my stuff in the bins (first bin: coat, shoes, liquids baggie second bin laptop, then backpack, then rollerbag). The x-ray operator had called a bag check on the person in front of me because he didn’t take his laptop out. That one was resolved fairly quickly. Then the x-ray operator got to my rollerbag and called a bag check on me. I watched that person and the 2 striper who came over about 3 minutes later for the bag check while they were looking at the x-ray. They seemed fairly fixated on my hair straightener. I thought that was ironic because I had just told someone on Yahoo Answers that hair straighteners are just fine in carry on bags. Even though the spot they kept pointing to was obviously my straightener, it turns out it was my toothbrush they were suspicious of.

This is the second time my toothbrush has resulted in a bag check. It kinda makes you wonder about the people TSA hires if they don’t know what a toothbrush looks like. It was just the cheap Oral-B sonic toothbrush with charger. the stupid thing stopped working anyway so maybe I just need to toss it at my destination after I get a manual one.