Hatam Soferet

Ugh, flying.

Bottles of ink, once breached, have a tiresome habit of opening themselves in transit and distributing themselves liberally, indelibly, and irretrievably, all over their surroundings. Accordingly, when I travel with breached bottles of ink, as I do frequently, I carry them in my backpack, so that I can make sure they stay upright.

I fell victim to an arbitrary search at the flight gate. The lady looked at my ink, neatly packed in the mandatory ziplock baggie. She looked at the bottle, and looked again, not finding any English words anywhere on the Hebrew label.

She didn't like this.

Even less did she like the two inkpots; they don't carry any label at all.

"You can't have these," she said, "they're not labelled."

"Where does it say liquids have to be labelled?" I asked her. "And in any case, isn't the entire point of the liquids rule the assumption that you can't believe any claims I make about the nature of these liquids?"

"This is an internal secondary-level search" she replied, as if that answered anything. "So we can take these away from you if we want to."

She called over a colleague.

"You can have one of these," he said. "You can choose which one you take on board."

"What?"

"One. You can take one."

"Can I combine the contents of these three bottles and you can have this empty one?"

He pondered this for a few moments. "No. How badly do you need these?"

"I don't need them on the flight at all. I carry them in my backpack so that I can make sure they don't spill. That isn't against the rules."

"How badly do you need them? You can keep one."

I explained that ink is exceedingly expensive and I am not, in fact, willing to discard any of it unless given a significantly more compelling reason than those hitherto offered.

"It's not about how expensive it is," he interrupted.

Fine. "You asked how badly I needed it, and need is a subjective concept. My need for this ink is based on its cost. I am answering the question you asked."

"So you don't need them."

"I'm not going to use them on the flight, no. I carry them in my backpack so that I can make sure they don't spill." He unscrewed one of the lids. "Don't get that on your clothes, it won't come off." He wiped his fingers nervously. Inwardly, I smirked.

He indicated the inkwells. "These aren't labelled."

"That's correct. They're inkwells."

"We can't tell what's in them, without labels."

For goodness' sake. "You wouldn't be able to tell what was in them even if they did have labels, would you?"

It irritates me immensely that if one does not comply blindly with illogical, unwritten, and wholly arbitrarily applied regulations, one can be designated a terminal security risk and refused permission to fly. Nonetheless, at this point I was ready to take non-compliance to the next level and request to see a supervisor, but to my surprise the male one turned away shaking his head, and the female one pushed the bottles towards me, saying "OK."

I'd have stalked off disdainfully, but a dignified exit is hard to do when you've still got to put your shoes back on. I had to settle for sitting on the floor wrestling with my bootlaces disdainfully, and to tell you the truth I think some of the effect may have been lost.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got an airline meal to eat. It looks rather distressingly soggy and greasy and like mutant green goo, but the label says "spinach pasta," and apparently labels are reliable indicators of content, so obviously it must indeed be spinach pasta. I might have to spice it up with some of that ink, though. Lucky they let me bring it on board.

Oh, my. I bought a mini-kettle, so as to be able to boil water for tea whilst at Drisha. Hitherto I've been boiling water in the microwave; they have a hot-water machine, but it's not hot. And the microwave somehow imparts a funny tinny taste to the tea.

And the kettle? Makes tea. And the tea?

Is.

Amazing.

I was supposed to do a phone interview at 8:00 Arizona time, which they said was 11:00 Eastern Standard time. A bit before 11am EST, I turn the phone on, and they've been trying to get hold of me for an hour.

Turns out Arizona doesn't do daylight savings, so when we put the clocks back, they stayed in the same place, and 8am for them is 10am for me. I have an inbox full of irritated "where-are-you" messages, which is decidedly galling, since I really don't think I should be expected to guess that Arizona doesn't change its clocks with the rest of the country.

Okay, hive mind, this is for those of you who bank with Chase: is it really true that you actually have to fill out a deposit slip with things like your address and account number every time you want to deposit cheques at an ATM, despite having fed your card into the machine so IT ALREADY KNOWS ALL THAT?