During one trip, I had my hand cream confiscated. During another trip, I'd forgotten I had a switchblade in my purse. I wasn't even trying to hide it, since I'd forgotten it was there, and I got it through with no problems. What a joke.

I flew Delta yesterday, and my husband had two Leathermans confiscated. We got to the airport in plenty of time, but Delta kept us on the baggage-check line for an hour while they practiced the most incompetent customer service I've seen in awhile.

By the time we got to the desk, it was too late to check luggage, so we had to take it through security, where they confiscated the knives, which would have been fine if we'd been able to check the luggage as we'd planned. The flight attendant ended up checking the luggage for us anyway. I'd like that $60 in knives back, but that's unlikely.

About 5-6 years ago I flew down to CA apparently with a swiss army knife in my bag. I only found out it was there when heading back home and the guy found it in a inside pocket and I had to either leave the line and ship it back or let them have it. I left the line, sent it fedex (it was at my door the next morning) and went back through security.

Another time I had an old briefcase with me that apparently had traces of explosives on it so I had to empty it out, show them it was old stamp collection, put it back together and they had to wipe their cloth deals all around it. This same TSA genius found my emergency eye glass repair kit in another bag and asked me what it was. I told him and his response was "good answer!"... the idiot was wearing glasses himself.

The worst was the old geezer who couldn't read my 2 month old passport and insisted twice that it was expired when I used it as ID leaving on a trip overseas. I had to point to him on the info page where the date he was citing as expired was the ISSUE date. He tried to laugh it off in such a way I almost thought he'd been jerking me around the whole time.

Why in God's name would this person touch it? At least if it didn't have his fingerprints on it they couldn't prove it was his should they accuse him of smuggling it on-board. I would have called the flight attendant over and pointed at it. I would have been happy to get out of my seat so they could retrieve it.

A few years ago, my mom and dad were traveling with some friends of theirs. One of the friends had a sewing kit in her purse and security made her throw out the tiny scissors when they found it. My grandmother had given my mom a 3-inch kitchen knife about a week before, and she'd forgotten it was in her purse. She went through security after the friend with no problem. She came back from Denver with no problem. She still didn't know the knife was in her purse until I saw her the next time and found it. And this was when people were getting their lotions and contact solutions tossed indiscriminately.

Allen, that's just what I thought. You couldn't have paid me to touch the knife, not necessarily for fingerprints, but because I'd want the flight attendants and/or air marshal to see it just where I found it. There's no way I would have it in my hand before someone came to retrieve it.

I recently flew in the USA, and had a similar experience. Very nice TSA people, because it was a relatively small airport with little traffic early on a Sunday morning. Nonetheless, the threat level was "orange" and security restrictions were the highest I've ever seen them.

We had to take literally everything out of our pockets. Anything with metal went into the trays for x-ray: belts, coins, watches, everything. Wallets and passports we got to carry through the new nude-scanners, and we still had to hand them over to be felt-up.

We come out the other side of the scanners and start putting ourselves back together. As we are putting things bank in our pockets, one of the security guys happened to notice the Swiss army knife on my son's keychain - it is such a part of his routine that he had totally forgotten about it. All this security, and they had failed to detect a perfectly ordinary knife. But they did make the little old lady next to us throw away her metal knitting needles.

It's ridiculous anyway. Weapons aren't dangerous - people are. If anyone wants to attack people on board, they can and will; improvising a weapon is easy. Besides, as we have seen once again, getting real weapons past security is trivially easy.