Friday, October 09, 2009

Making the difference...

I am not a fan of Go - No Go decisions. Traffic lights, eating out, new movie, quitting jobs, bad habits, buying a car, selling a car. Why is it so difficult when the only two outcomes are so far apart? Should it just not be easier to make up my mind? But these situations, just like my annoying mid term close-ended papers at Uni, are the worst of the lot. They are really the end of the decision tree and you have to go through the entire process of ifs and buts and smaller yesses and nos before you reach the divine clarity you need. I find it annoying. It wastes my time and is sub-optimum if one is to follow the universal optimism that there is no such thing as a wrong answer. It is therefore, not the 'GNG' decision, but the fact that I am swamped with many and tiny GNG decisions that could change my life. My last big GNG decision, albeit a quick one, was whether I should purchase an enormously large box of Bounty chocolates at Dubai Duty Free on my way back to Copenhagen. The limiting factor was, hold your breath, that I risked losing them to liquid restrictions in hand luggage at the next airport I landed. But for my own entertainment, I really wanted to be held up by customs for what they presumed were 6 dozen venemous liquid filled capsules of mass destruction so that I would have something to write about on my blog. Unfortunately, despite my planned sabotage, I breezed through transit and managed to land in at my destination with no Interpol on my back. It was almost disappointing. You would think that as long as you did not stuff coke up your butt or smell of gunpowder, air travel would be just another means of getting from point A to B. However, the post 09/11 slash busted London bombers myth that holding up millions of passengers at airports around the world will deter terrorism has reached unacceptable levels of paranoia. And I would be fine with random checks as would Shah Rukh Khan, but it makes me hysterical to see how profiled this random selection is. To be honest, it does not offend me one bit and I actually find it quite amusing - Young, brown, Muslim, Indian woman living in the Middle East... I am the perfect bait, until I open my mouth. And so, my joy ride reached a fun ending as I was about to exit the restricted area of the airport. I suddenly noticed I was walking right past a sniffer dog. They scare the living daylights out of me. Thus, I jumped. How abnormal I know. That and I was whisked away by an important looking guy into a very cold interrogation room. He asked me if I was importing any cheese, alcohol or meat from Dubai. I said I was not a fan of a, I did not do b and I could not possibly manage c given the estimated time I would spent at each airport at origin, transit and destination. He was not amused, but he was not meant to be. I brought my chocolates home in the 72 pieces I bought them in. And I am going to push it up one notch and go for caramel filling next time. What could possibly go wrong.

1 comment:

Mahwish said...

Umm knowing you, you'd manage to somehow squash all the chocolates so there's a BIG caramel explosion and then you get interrogated for some unlikely terrorist activity. Am i close? ;p