Spoon Fed That Bomb Joke

I was the stupid customer in this one. We were in the security line at the airport, waiting to get through. We had to fly across the country because my grandmother had just died, and we needed to be there.

We made it to the other side, but our stuff, including my backpack, hadn’t. So, we waited. And we waited. And waited. Finally, an airport worker walked over to us and asked if any of us might have brought a metal spoon. We shook our heads, and he walked away.

About two minutes after he walked away, I had a sudden realization. Two weeks before I had been on a youth retreat of sorts where we decorated spoon handles with clay. I had used the same backpack on that trip. I remembered putting the spoon in the side pocket, but not taking it out. Normally for a trip like this, I would have emptied out all of the pockets. However, because I was still reeling from the news of my grandmother’s death, I hadn’t been thinking clearly. Thus, emptying out my backpack had simply slipped my mind.

I flagged down the same airport worker and explained my theory. He took my backpack out and handed it off to his female coworker. She took it to the side to search through for the spoon. Along with the tangled mess of charging cords and headphones, she pulled out the clay-handled spoon. At the sight of the silly [Popular Cartoon Character] handle, she started to laugh. When she saw my confusion, she explained. Their software had detected metal surrounded by organic material surrounded by wires. They’d thought that the only thing that it could be was a bomb. I began to laugh, too, and she put everything back into my bag.

I’ve always heard horror stories about the TSA, but they didn’t act anything like I would’ve expected. While it did slow us down, I got a good laugh during a week where there hadn’t been much to laugh about.