Almost There...

Jen, Charles and Hello Kitty at the Taipei Airport

Have I ever told you about the time I traveled with another person to Cambodia who unknowingly was smuggling contraband? Yeah…

On a crisp cold San Francisco morning, Liam walked out to his car on Shotwell to find an inebriated man passed out in his back seat. Already late to work, Liam told the man to get out. The man barely bothered to open his eyes and refused to leave. Liam then opened the car door, yanked the man out of his car, threw him on the street and got in and drove off to work. Later in the day he noticed that there was a backpack in his back seat—a nice reminder of the events that happened earlier in the morning.

Thinking nothing of it, Liam started using the bag. It was after all, a nice clean looking bag and besides, he had already emptied and cleaned it out, so really, there was no reason to not be using the bag.

Fast forward several months later. We’re going through the airport security line in SFO. They scan the bag, then scan the bag yet again, and finally pull Liam aside to search the contents of the bag and ask him what was in it. Not that big of a deal right? After all it was post 9/11 and not all too uncommon for airport security to be really anal about everything. Well, now let’s repeat that sequence several more times—in LAX, when we arrived in Thailand and then again in Cambodia.

At every single check point, Liam’s bag was scanned several times, was questioned on the contents of his bag, had his bag thoroughly searched and questioned again. And every time his bag was searched, they found nothing.

I remember when we were at the security check in Thailand, there being huge yellow signs everywhere that said:

TRAFFICKING ANY ILLEGAL SUBSTANCES IS PUNISHABLE BY DEATH

And then I remember thinking, what was that movie again? Where the two chicks get tricked into trafficking drugs and then get thrown into Thai jail? What dumb asses…

Well, when we finally arrived at our hotel in Phnom Penh, Liam decided to thoroughly search his bag himself. Dumping the contents all over the hotel bed, and searching all the little pockets, he eventually found a secret compartment. Inside the secret compartment that had been cleverly sewn to the inseams of the bag, he then found a secret pocket. And in that, he found, well he found a crack pipe.

So the moral to the story is: if you kick a dude out of your car who leaves a bag behind and then think it's a really awesome idea to use it--uh, don't be a dumb ass.