I survived a TSA patdown

“Hold out your hands, please,” said the nice young man. He then ran a little device over my hands and asked for backup assistance. A very business-like woman told me that my hands had tested positive for explosives residue. Right away I realized what it was: for five days I had been using organic dish soap at my kids’ house in New Mexico. I told the young man that, and his reply was, “Organic? That should have been better than regular dish soap.”

I replied, “Yes, you would think so, but it is not. I regularly use the Walmart Great Value dish soap for sensitive skin, and it doesn’t shrivel up my skin like that organic dish soap. See how wrinkly my hands are?” He wasn’t buying it, and called three big burly men over. They asked me to take everything out of my pockets, take off my belt and shoes, and go into a scanner and raise my hands high.

When I did that, things got worse. It seems my shirt had made yellow spots in three or four places on their screen. “Oh, I said, I can explain. You see, where I have been living the last five days, they do not have a dryer. It’s on a mesa top near Santa Fe. After I washed my clothes, I hung them out to dry on a fence.” I thought to myself, maybe the wind blew in some radioactive particles from the Los Alamos Nuclear grounds. The men took me to a private screening room.

Then they found three suspicious bottles: Sinus Rinse. The man was now getting a look of concern on his face. I said, “It’s just water, salt, and baking soda.” He asked, “Why does it have a hole in the top of each bottle?” “That’s where you squirt it into your nose,” I answered. “It really works. Try it the next time you have any problems with your sinuses.”

After patting me up and down and sideways, they let me proceed to my waiting flight. When I saw smiles replace their looks of deep concern, I thought it might be a good time to share with them something I had read on the internet, probably at Chateau Heartiste. “You know, we could replace all the TSA employees and machines if the airlines would just seat all the alpha males in aisle seats and tell them to look for anyone acting suspiciously.” Then it hit me: there probably aren’t enough alpha males left to fill the aisle seats.