Security Theater; Courthouse Edition

Back in the Dark Ages of the 1990s, when I was in law school, I had a part-time job with a local law firm. This was before the introduction of the PACER system of electronic filing, so if you wanted to file any papers in a court case, somebody had to go to the courthouse and file the stuff with the court clerk.

To put it simply, that's what I did. I'd show up at the lawyers' offices in the middle of the afternoon, collect the papers and the checks for filing fees and go to the county courthouse. It didn't pay a lot, but they paid for mileage, parking and it was enough to buy groceries (or beer).

Then came the day that they wanted me to file something in the federal court. The federal courthouse had security right at the entrance. (The county courthouse didn't, they only had it at the entrances to the courtrooms themselves, probably because the traffic flow to the county clerk's office was huge.)

So they ran my purse through the x-ray machine and saw this:

That was a "gimmie" from a job I had had well before I went to law school, I had to sit through a promotional pitch by a company that was trying to sell stuff to my employer, so the salesman handed out them as bribes tokens of his esteem.

This is it with the knife blade extended:

And with everything extended:

The courthouse security guys, all of them close to double the AARP eligibility age, first wanted to confiscate it. I said that I wanted it back and if I had to go back to my car and leave it there, I would. Finally, the senior one said that they'd "check it in" for me and I could get it back when I left.

Which was all of five minutes later.

When I came back, I handed the guard my claim check and he handed me back the knife. As he did so, he looked stern and said: "You realize that this is a dangerous weapon, don't you?"

I looked at it in my hand. About the only way that I could kill someone with it would have been to knock them to the ground, sit on their back, pull up their head by the hair and saw away at their neck. I used mostly the scissors and the nail file. The knife blade wasn't sharp, then, not by a long shot.

But I didn't see any profit in arguing that with the old dude, so all I said was: "If you say so, Officer" with a slight sing-song intonation and I left.

I make damn sure that the little knife is in my car. Along with my cell phone and my LED flashlight (yes, flashlights are prohibited in the federal courthouse-- don't ask me why).