Due to my sporadic and completely unpredictable travel for work I get to observe airport security at various times of the day as well as all over the place.
In some of the more regional areas that I travel you know to allow extra time to clear security. I work in the mining industry and have to carry a bit of equipment with me to different sites. One piece gets me pulled up at the X-ray scanner more than your average person who forgets coins in their pocket or keys or even to tale off their steel cap boots (can't really laugh here I've done it at 4am before).
One day I was traveling home from a particular location that is more thorough then most and was quite seriously taken aside and they said to me "sir you are either carrying a portable DVD player in you carry on luggage or a bomb". Now naturally when faced with this situation you start to wonder if one of your colleague's has set you up but not this time. After rescanning my bag about a dozen times from all different orientations and fussing over it with explosive trace tests they came back and said " sorry sir we believe we are mistaken and that is a portable DVD player". And asked me to open my bag ( I'd offered to start with), they were quite shocked to see that it was neither of their options. I then explained to them that it was in fact a ultrasonic tester to measure the thickness of solid metal parts. Of course this threw them completely and they re-scanned my bag another dozen times.
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