Fun with customs - was Re: Linux weenies - alt.sysadmin.recovery

Message from discussion Fun with customs - was Re: Linux weenies

Peter Gutmann

More options Dec 12 1996, 3:00 am

Newsgroups: alt.sysadmin.recovery

From: pgut...@cs.auckland.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann)

Date: 1996/12/12

Subject: Re: Fun with customs - was Re: Linux weenies

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Simon Slavin (slav...@hearsay.demon.co.uk) wrote (I edited):

> I have my own customs story to tell. Some friends and I used to
> fly to Paris or Amsterdam fairly frequently. As an average group
> of four people we got stopped at customs about every-other trip.
> Every single time, /I/ was the one searched. I was the one who
> wore a black leather jacket and had hair down to my waist. My
> friends had shorter haircuts and wore more genteel clothes. Of
> course, the Customs officers would start off using a hand-held
> metal-detector which would inevitably started beeping. At this
> point I would produce my ... flick-knife ? hand-gun ? No, just
> my Asthma inhaler which has a metal cannister. Didn't quite go
> with the biker-image. Those poor guys spent many futile minutes
> pawing though my rucksack. I actually stuck a "Hello, nice Mr.
> Customs man." sign in it once but didn't get stopped that trip.

San Francisco customs detected suspicious amounts of metal on me a few months
ago and wanted to know what it was. "About 40 paperclips" - "Why are you
carrying 40 paperclips?" - "To get the handcuffs off, of course![0]". They
waved me through.

A friend of mine told me about someone he knew who got stopped (also in SF)
for wearing a leather collar with a padlock on it. "Could you open the
padlock?" - "No, I don't have the key" - "Who has it?" - "My mistress". No
more questions, your honour.

I've never been stopped by Customs (yet), despite my rather long hair, faded
jeans, and t-shirt. Even Singapore customs just waved me through. I've been
threatenend with another trip there in a few months along with a friend with
equally long hair who wears even rattier jeans and older t-shirts than mine.
He once turned up at his hotel in NY at 7am (after lying in a puddle of vomit
in a gutter for half the night[1]) in jeans with holes in them and a t-shirt
with vomit stains on it, and they wouldn't let him in the door. Funny that.
He also had fun explaining to the San Diego[2] police why he was crawling
around the front lawn of a building at 3am with a knife "looking for frogs"[3].

Peter.

[0] Not really, but I doubted they'd ask me any more questions after that.
[1] For Aucklanders who know what it means, this person is a Westie.
[2] Bizarre place. The airport closes at 11:30pm[4], and one of the
motorways has a sign on it which says "Cruise ships use airport exit".
("Hey like, this is some good shit man. Now, what was that sign we were
supposed to be painting?"). Avoid flying there if you can.
[3] I couldn't explain this one either.
[4] So I nearly spent the night sleeping on a bench outside one of the
terminals because everyone had gone home.

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