Just for the record, I will note that standing seven hours in line at an airport, missing a couple of flights, spending a night (or two) at a hotel, and having one's belongings pawed do not constitute some kind of tragedy worthy of overmuch sympathy. Since I had a lot of time to think about the experience of standing in lines over the weekend, I was able to cheer myself up by noting that at least I wasn't some Soviet citizen of the 1970s waiting half the day -- every day -- just to get a lump of stale bread or a bottle of rotgut vodka.

Still, for Aeromexico, this week couldn't have been a good one for the balance sheet. By at least one estimate, a canceled flight costs an airline $250,000. But the cascading effect from so many passengers missing connections because of the long delays had to make the red ink flow far beyond a single flight's cancellation. I saw hundreds of people being offered hotel rooms, food vouchers, first-class upgrades, free tickets to other destinations -- all in a desperate attempt to prevent increasingly unruly and angry mobs from completely losing control.

And those immediate costs pale against what is probably much more significant: a rise in the general unwillingness of passengers to deal with the hassle, period. Mexico City wasn't the only airport resembling an anthill poked with a stick this past weekend. At Los Angeles International, on Sunday, the scene was also out of control, even at normally super-efficient terminals such as Southwest's. According to press reports, security levels around the world were at their highest ever.

And maybe rightfully so. Maybe all that security prevented attacks that would otherwise have happened. Looked at optimistically, maybe this past weekend might have marked the high-water point for security concerns at airports, and life will gradually transition back to something roughly approaching normal.

But what if it doesn't? What if there is another terrorist attack involving airlines, and the security measures in place this past weekend become the norm? If they do, it's going to be pretty hard for airlines to make a decent buck, and plenty of travelers may decide there are better ways to spend the weekend than admiring airline decor and contemplating the Rashomonic aspects of how six different airline personnel can tell six different stories about why your flight is being delayed.

I could go on -- I could describe the paranoia that begins to seep in, once you've been informed by another passenger that undercover TSA agents are standing in line with you with the authority to cancel your flight if they deem the security insufficient. Suddenly, a personality disorder akin to that suffered by prisoners who fall in love with their torturers sweeps over you. Please, search my bag more carefully, you start to think. No -- don't skip that pocket -- someone might see you and cancel the flight!

But instead, as a public service to future travelers, I'll offer some tips from my personal experience on ways to avoid setting off alarms at airports.

1) Do not have a ticket that has you originally leaving a given airport on a Sunday, which you have changed mid-trip to leave on Saturday, but which then became further altered when you missed your Saturday flight and now have to catch a Sunday flight. This kind of ticket is considered something of a red flag to airline personnel. It is not helpful. Especially when you are demanding a first-class upgrade, unless you can somehow give the impression that you are a TSA agent, in which case you can get very nice treatment.

2) Do not stay overnight in a Marriott hotel that for unexplained reasons has no water flowing in its shower or sink at 3 a.m. Not being able to take a shower after spending a whole day waiting in lines at an airport makes you look like a terrorist. People who look like terrorists wait in longer lines, and have their toiletries examined with closer attention. Having your toiletries examined with overly close attention makes you want to be a terrorist. This is also not helpful.

3) Do not be traveling with a cardboard box sealed closed with layers of packing tape and stuffed with Mexican handicrafts wrapped in multiple layers of newspaper. Security agents find such boxes to be presumptive indications of guilt for something, and they tend to lose their sense of humor when unwrapping the sixth little ceramic statue of a Zapotec warrior king. Also, it is not helpful to inform said security agent that they are opening up a box that has been opened up and searched three times already in the past 36 hours.

4) Do not somehow end up responsible for a traveling companion's luggage in addition to yours. For reasons too complicated to explain here, I became separated from my companion in the Mexico City airport, and she ended up flying out of the country (possibly with a fighter jet escort, and only five hours after the originally scheduled departure) without even realizing that I was still standing in line with all the bags in the bowels of the airport. When the security guard has already decided that the person standing in front of him with a screwed-up itinerary, unshaven cheeks and greasy hair is clearly up to no good, the last thing they want to hear is that you are carrying someone else's luggage with you, and no, you are not exactly sure what is in the fucking box. (Although by the end of the weekend, I did have a pretty good idea what was in the box, as I cheekily informed the U.S. customs agent. Who then proceeded to cast suspicion on my books.)

5) Do not have a Chinese dictionary in your carry-on. Only terrorists take Chinese dictionaries to Mexico with them for a New Year's vacation.

As readers have probably figured out by now, by the end of the weekend I was pretty much convinced that I was in fact a terrorist, and all the delays and flight cancellations were a result of computers choking on my personal profile. I'd like to apologize to everyone who was in the Mexico City International Airport last weekend, because it might all have been my fault. I'm sorry.

But if you think my jocularity is out of place in discussing security measures designed to prevent attacks such as those on the World Trade Center, then think again. In the world we're now living in, we are all being treated as if each and every one of us is a terrorist until proven innocent. This is hard enough for the travel industry to handle financially. How are the rest of us going to cope with it psychologically, as the century winds on?

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