Welcome Back

So today I got back to Germany. After about seven weeks of eating tacos, saying excuse me after running into people accidentally and nearly accepting the convention of wearing sweatpants in public, I hit German soil again at around noon. Frankfurt Airport.

Now this ALWAYS happens to me at Heathrow, and I was surprised to have it occur in überefficient Deutschland: somehow somewhere around immigration control, I ended up exiting the airport and needing to go through all of the passport checks and security again in order to get to my connecting flight back home to Berlin.

Ugh. Well, it happens. I marched my extremely heavy duffel bag (affectionately referred to as “blue baby”) over to arrivals A (which is surprisingly far away from departures A, it must be said), all the while trying to quickly drain the entire contents of the full 1.5 liter bottle of Fuji water I’d hoped to chug back during the next flight.

The security line was absurdly long, but luckily, soon after I took my place at the very end of said line, an elderly German man in a festive red vest (and a predictably un-festive mien) and a sign that said Gates A1-42 led the unhappy back wing of the security line, like a surly, muttering pied piper, to a smaller security area (2 belts) a short distance away.

Oh, if I’d only remembered the sad fate of Hamelin’s children…

German security tends (or has tended) to be less annoying that that of the U.S. No naked machines. No enhanced pat-downs. In fact, you don’t even have to take your shoes off. In this instance, I did as one normally does…pocket junk, big floppy outerwear and liquids in one basket, the laptop in the next, followed by the carryon itself.

I passed through the metal detector without incident and waited for my stuff to come through. The two baskets came back, but blue baby did not. The unhappy-looking dyke of a security guard had it in her thick arms. “Is this yours?”

“Yes.”

“Open it, please.”

And so I did. She re-ran the superdrive for my new Mac Air (I won’t take this precise occasion to swoon), along with my external hard drive. Also, with these items removed, she ran blue baby through the machine again.

And so I waited. And the increasingly exasperated folks in line waited—gnawing at their cuticles and checking the time on their cell phones. And we waited. And waited.

I couldn’t help but notice a marked increase of traffic around the x-ray monitor. There was pointing, shrugging, giggling, scrolling back to an earlier picture of blue baby, looking around, waving somebody else over, and then the process would repeat. The excitement seemed to center around my iPod dock. Seeing this, I offered to turn it on and lay down some def beats (paraphrase) up in that particular hizz-aus. The burly biological female who’d first singled out the bag only gave me a dirty look.

After a while, they began diverting the agitated members of my particular security line to the other line/machine in the area. I became the single, unlucky customer, watching as more and more doughy, undereducated, chuckling security agents (for a firm called “Brinks”, said their badges) pushed past their acne-prone colleagues to slowly shake their heads and emit low whistles whilst looking at the geometric blowup of that oddly single-celled-organism-looking image…that happened to be my shitty InMotion iPod dock.



Earlier, I’d noticed the “hot one” of the security staff—also a thick-cut-steak, but in this case proudly ornamented with long, crunchy curls and what appeared to be a valiant attempt at smoky eyes—talking to a tall older gentleman. From the clumsy batting of her spiders-legs eyelashes and his cockily lascivious countenance, I quickly ascertained that he served as supervisor to this band of illiterates.

After he’d spent a few moment’s nodding gravely at the X-Ray image of my iPod dock, he approached me and asked for my passport. “That’s a very strange looking laptop you have there,” he intoned coolly…

“…yes well, you see, that’s because it’s not a laptop. It’s an iPod dock. My laptop went through just fine…it’s a Mac Air 11”. Want to see it? It is just SO light and just as cute as anything you’ve ever seen and…”

He frowned, interrupting “We’ll need to keep this.” My passport disappeared into his pocket and growled into his walkie-talkie “The suspect is calling it an iPod dock. We’re gonna need backup.”

“Seriously, I can play some tunes for you guys…” I began.

The supervisor-man grunted something, turned around, and began to grimly “evacuate” all other passengers in the security line. One woman, who had waited ages and was about to put her belongings on the belt became quite hysterical, wailing about missing her flight. After her and her similarly panicked compatriots were all shuttled off, supervisor man urged his team of moon-faced imbeciles to pack up their belongings as well.

The iPod dock remained in the X-ray machine, like a coffin in a funereal carriage. My passport was still with supervisor-man. My flight would now clearly also be missed, and by gum, that rapidly emptied 1.5 liter bottle of Fuji water was definitely not adding any sort of helpful color to the entire spectacle.

Minutes later the mall (“airport”) cops began arriving. After that, the normal Frankfurt police arrived, and cordoned off the security area and the waiting and boarding areas of Gates A1-4. A little narrow white van drove through the irritated/curious crowd of passengers and the 2-man explosives team sprung out, ready to do battle with the forces of two-year-old mp3 speaker technology. I was so shocked to see the van and the bomb squad that I didn’t even notice the military police in riot gear appearing…complete with clear plastic masks, bullet-proof vests, machine guns and, in two cases, German shepherds. They must have shown up at around the same time.

I want to emphasize the fact that I am not exaggerating about ANY part of this story. It was like being in a dream. The strangest, was that I wasn’t cuffed, or taken away or anything similar (no body cavity search, which is a bit unfortunate, considering that I have a relatively fresh wax on). Nothing. There I was, at the end, leaning up against the abandoned service counter of Gate A1, to the left seeing a throng of travelers, at whom “Get back!” would be barked if any individual thereof wandered over to grab a newspaper in the A3 area. A line of afore-mentioned security clowns stood in a grim line, placing a pudgy border between the mass of passengers and the armored military police, whom apparently had their dimpled acne-covered backs covered.

To the right was the security area, now totally deserted but for the two members of the bomb squad—who valiantly struggled to ascertain the threat posed by my iPod dock. The white van was parked outside of the exit to the security area, behind which a bullet-proof-vested MP stood, apparently bored, but not nearly so bored as his German shepherd, which lounged dozily on the floor.

Lounged dozily, that is, until I made an attempt to approach the supervisor-man from my place there in no-man’s land. Suffice it to say that those dogs move very, very quickly.

It was all over in a mere 45 minutes. One of the bomb-squad guys (with an expression that said “this is bullshit and I’m really sorry”…which was well appreciated and was the closest thing to an apology-related gesture that I would receive) approached my position in the German-Shepherd-enforced no-man’s-land with the offending iPod dock in hand. He was rubbing it down with what looked like a small sheet of vellum.

“So it’s an iPod dock, you say…” he began.

“Seriously. Just let me stick my iPod on that thing and prove it to you.” I was desperate. My flight had taken off ten minutes before.

“How is the Bass performance?”

His strategy was perplexing. “It’s pretty useless.” I replied. “Sort of sounds like a tin can being scraped against asphalt, sometimes. I should get a better one. Maybe a Bose.”

He looked at me squarely. “You know, they might close down the entire airport for a Bose.”

I was speechless. He had me turn my docking station on and off once, then wandered back to his van, leaving the little machine on the counter in front of me. Looking up, I saw that the biological female, the “hot one” and the rest of the security monkeys had all disappeared. Supervisor-man had probably taken them all out to lunch at Frankfurt’s equivalent of Chuck-E-Cheese to congratulate them for a job well done. An airport cop tapped me on the shoulder and, after I turned toward him, handed me back my passport.

“Here miss, enjoy your time in Germany.”

Oh welcome back, Lyd. Welcome back.