Who's Guarding The Airport
They're drones who can't think for themselves and can only follow policy -- in jackbooted lock-step. Sometimes, there's a substantial cost for this -- far beyond having to pour out bottled water you've paid for or throw away a cupcake in a jar.

Via Charlotte Allen, there's a chilling story of a trachea grown in a lab that was to be transplanted into a woman in Barcelona -- and how it almost didn't make it there in time thanks to airport "security" in the UK. Robert Krulwich writes on NPR:

No, said airline security, you can't take this bottle onboard. It exceeds the 100 milliliter limit; it's forbidden.

But wait, said professor Martin Birchall of Bristol University. This is a medical container. Inside is a trachea, a carefully constructed human windpipe, seeded with 60 million stem cells from a very sick woman in Barcelona. We have just 16 hours to get it into her body. We pre-arranged this.

We have no record of your request, said the airline.

You do have a record, said the professor. There's a woman in Barcelona right now who needs this, and we are running out of time. It took us five months to create this organ. It is the first of its kind. We must board this plane.

Sometimes, leaps in medical science require an agreeable security guard, and on this day in 2008, he wasn't playing. The guard, then his supervisors, said no. Being larger than 100 milliliters, the bottle was categorically dangerous material. If Birchall insisted on boarding the plane, he would be arrested.

A medical student ended up saving the day:

At this point, the medical student who was going to take the organ to Barcelona, Philipp Jungerbluth, told Birchall that he had a pilot friend in Germany with a small jet who could come immediately to Bristol, take the container and fly it straight to Spain. Calls were made, the friend agreed to do it for "cost" -- 14,000 pounds (about $21,000) and Birchall paid on the spot. (He was later reimbursed by his university.)

We have no record of your request, said the airline.
Philipp, instead of flying on easyJet, took the trachea to Barcelona with his pilot friend and later told science writer Mark Stevenson that easyJet "wouldn't even refund the 70 pounds for the original ticket."

The trachea did make it to Barcelona, and then into Claudia Castillo. Ten days after her operation, Castillo was discharged from the hospital. Within weeks, her lung function rebounded. Tests showed she was back to normal for her age, and doctors found no antibodies that would indicate her body was rejecting the transplant. The Guardian reports that later she called up her doctor to tell him she'd been dancing that night in a club in Ibiza.

If it had been up to airport "security," she would likely have been six feet under being eaten by worms. Vive la difference.