This morning I flew United Airlines from Detroit to Houston, and I had three boxes worth of Topps packs from blasters with me in my carry-on bag. Thinking I was being smart to save space and avoid having that theft-deterrent metal sticker set something off at the screening machine, I took the packs out of their boxes and lined them up in a 400 count box. Well that turned out to be a huge mistake. Despite the fact that my flight left Detroit at 6:30 A.M. on a holiday, there was a big line to get through at the screening area. Almost every bag was being detoured off the conveyor belt for the next available guy to go through it. So 15 minutes later, somebody finally gets to mine. He takes everything out of the bag and starts going through them one by one. When he got to the unopened packs, he had to put his liquid stuff on them to make sure they weren't explosive, and then he felt up EACH PACK individually, which took another 10 minutes. He also opened the other boxes with cards and (after I showed him how to open them without dumping the cards all over the counter), couldn't fit them all back into my bag. Finally I was able to talk him into letting me do it. So a half hour later I was running to the far corner of the airport to become the last person to board my plane - I almost missed it. So lesson learned - if you take unopened cards on a plane, leave them in their original boxes!
