That Time I Accidentally Became TSA’s Problem, Again

I have been pulled aside by TSA more times than I can count.

Almost all of them were while I was a flight attendant. Let me be clear and say I wasn't pulled aside because I'm dangerous. I just sometimes make questionable packing decisions.

It was a STRUG-GLE adjusting to traveling as a regular PAX* after I left the airline industry for the tech industry. I was used to bringing full size bottles of anything I wanted. Not that I necessarily wanted to, but not every product has a travel size. One of the many benefits of being flight crew was being allowed a lot more liquids than the average passenger. And, except for a handful of airports, I could bring as many liquid items as I wanted and not have to worry about the quart-size bag limit. Within reason, of course.

This leeway is due to the fact that many flight crew members live out of our suitcases, and pack meals for multiple days. But it's only possible because we go through such extensive background checks. They do not give those badges to just anyone; our credentials are verified constantly, and there’s this unspoken understanding that we’re not out here trying to take down the aviation system we actively work inside of. They still scan all of our bags, they just don’t care if there is a quart of soup, a large sized can of hair spray, a liter of gatorade, and a normal-sized bottle of perfume along with the usual assortment of liquid toiletries any human might travel with.

All of of this is great! Unless you forget that the X-ray machine cannot distinguish your job title.

If you don't let the TSA agent reviewing bags know that you're crew, you might just give them a mild heart attack and get yourself briefly inconvenienced. I'll get to that memory in a moment.

First, let me paint you a picture: I had just spent a week with my parents in CLT, visiting my family. My little sister (who is eleven years younger than me and leaning into her “cute boutique girl” era) was working at this shop that sold nothing you actually need, but everything you absolutely want.

The place was full of delightful things. Lollia hand lotions in luxurious, feminine scents. Delicate porcelain dishes in increasingly diminutive sizes. Voluspa candles in every conceivable vessel. Substantial, thick stationery customizable with your embossed initials. The kind of place where everything smells expensive and looks like it belongs in a gift basket for someone named Miranda.

And my sister gets a 40% discount.

So obviously, I lose all sense of reason. Y'all, I can Girl Math anything in that store into making sense. There was this line of bath and body products I loved: alongside matching lotion, I found little handmade-looking bags of bath salts, all neatly packaged, adorable, each adorned with a crystal bauble that looked like it came off a vintage chandelier. I decide these would make great gifts for a friend (or maybe give me something delightful to do on a rainy day layover).

So I buy four.

Four small, neatly packaged bags of white powder.

And because I am also apparently incapable of thinking one step ahead, I pack them all together in my suitcase. Right next to a very large, very expensive candle.

You know. Just a little bag of potential “explosive material” next to what could easily be interpreted as an “ignition source.” Totally normal behavior. Nothing to see here.

My dad drops me off at the airport. I'm going through security, not in uniform, but wearing my crew badge. I toss my bag on the belt, not thinking twice about it. Not even thinking once about it!

And then I see that pause. You know the one. Where the person staring at the X-ray screen goes from casually scanning to…hold on. Their whole body shifts into a totally different being. Their head tilts. Their eyes narrow just a little. Their neck pulls back. And suddenly I’m like—

Oh.

Oh no.

I know exactly what that looks like. Sure enough, my bag gets pulled. "Whose bag is this?" they call. I raise my hand. I make that chagrined face. This isn't the same agent who pulled the bag from the scanner, just someone whose turn is next to dig into people's stuff.

To their credit, this TSA agent is being polite about it, as they are with anyone. I'm not setting off any flags yet.

“Ma’am, we just need to take a look inside your bag.”

"Absolutely. Of course you do. I would also like to take a look inside my bag at this point, because now I’m curious how bad this looks from your angle."

They ask if there’s anything sharp. “Nope! I’m a flight attendant, just headed back to work from a trip to visit family, got some goodies in there.” Which is technically true, though not necessary for me to add, but I get anxious and overshare when I’m nervous.

They open the bag. They look at the screen showing them what to look for. They lift a neatly folded jacket and my uniform skirt out of the way, and there it is. Four little bags of barely-identified white powder.

Neatly arranged.

Next to a candle.

And this is the moment where it fully clicks for me: I have, quite accidentally, packed my carry-on to look like a starter kit for a very specific kind of federal investigation. The agent cocks their head to the side and gives me the "Girrrl..." look of are you for real right now? You know better than this.**

I give a patented game-but-unsure smile and say "But they smelled so good! It seemed like a good idea at the time!" Like that somehow makes it better. The agent softens. Not altogether charmed, but they're at least not making me throw my stuff in the trash like I had to one time coming home through LHR

Side note: I hate flying through LHR for many reasons, but this one time really lit the fuse on my tampon.

"I can see the label says bath salts, and I see your crew badge, but I'm still going to need to check. You know..."

"...for safety," we finish together. "If I was smart, I would have carried those in a little gift bag or something, not in my suitcase, and made this easier for both of us." They nod. "Yeah, maybe do that next time."

They pull out this...device...and start swabbing everything. The candle. The bags of suspicious white powder. The handle of my suitcase. There's a whole process. People around me are trying not to appear nosy, but you can tell several of them are curious and trying to eavesdrop. I’m standing there, completely calm on the outside, but internally I am dying laughing because I know exactly how this looks and there is nothing I can do to undo it. This is the unintentionally humorous side of the Maigen Magic that I manifest.

Everything clears, obviously. Because I am not, in fact, transporting anything illegal or potentially dangerous. They send me on my way, and I walk off still chuckling at myself.

Not that long after that instance, though, I did something arguably worse.

I had just come back from my first layover in Italy, where I spent twenty-four glorious hours in Pisa.

If you haven't traveled to many places in Italy, you need to know one thing: Pisa is not Rome. It is not Milan. It's not big, or bustling. Pisa is a sleepy coastal town with one extremely famous building doing all the heavy lifting. For most people, when they see the Leaning Tower of Pisa, it's kind of a let down. Don't build it up in your head too much, but it's still a pretty dope example of old architecture.

But it was my first time in Italy, so I was completely enchanted. I had strawberry gelato three times in 24 hours because fragola was an easy word to learn in Italian. I was too broke to go to any fancy dinners, so I just grabbed some fresh bread, meat, and cheese at a local grocery store, along with an extremely local, extremely inexpensive bottle of Sangiovese wine.

When I say "extremely inexpensive" I kid you not, the bottle was less than 2 Euros. For a bottle of wine. Even the crappiest of bottles of wine near my crashpad in Kew gardens was like, $8, and that's the stuff you could use to strip paint off of old furniture. This wine, made in Italy from Italian grapes, would improve the quality of my life and cost me very little money. I think to myself "I'd like to bring a few home." I remember thinking it would be almost irresponsible not to take advantage of this.

Side note: I'll talk about flight attendant drinking culture some other time, but trust me, this made so much sense in the moment, because remember: I'm broke as hell at this point in my career.

I’m in this tiny European grocery store, staring at these bottles of wine for €2 and just saying "Two euros" under my breath. I've got four bottles in my hands. Then I set those down and go back to the front of the store for a basket. I keep adding to the basket until, frankly, it just gets too heavy. Remember, I've got to get these into my suitcase and then get my suitcase into the overhead bin. I put a couple of bottles back.

I lug my wine haul back to the hotel, feeling like I had just unlocked some kind of international life hack. And then I did what any rational person would do: I shoved all of my clothes to the sides of my suitcase and crammed every single bottle in there. I have no padding strategy. No long-term planning for what happens if turbulence. Just new-flight-attendant optimism, pure orange-cat-one-brain-cell vibes in this decision-making process.

Y’all, on second edit, I recognize now that I was playing a high-stakes combination of Tetris and poker…or maybe I mean roulette. Anyway, you can see how this is not my best idea. But everything always works out mostly perfectly for me. I’m incredibly lucky, and great at manifesting. You’ll notice a trend, though, of decisions and circumstances that most people wouldn’t have said the initial “yes” to experience the outcome of.

Spoiler: none of the bottles of wine broke. They all arrived intact. Whew.

Now, what I did not know at the time was that when you, as working airline crew, bring alcohol back into the U.S., you are supposed to declare it. The Customs and Border Protection forms are handed out by the lead flight attendant on the way home to anyone who needs one, but no instructions are given by or to the crew. It’s nobody’s business what you’re bringing back is the impression I got from the crew I was with. So far as I understood, CBP Form 5129 - Crew Member's Declaration and Instructions contains all the information you need.

Here's what mine looked vaguely like:

Under "Quantity and Description of Goods" I wrote "wine," and under "Cost or Value of Gifts, etc." I wrote $19.

My customs form is technically and legally true. It didn't ask me how many bottles of wine I brought, and I didn't know until months after this that there's a “reasonable” limit for crew, too, but it's just not called out in the instructions as specifically as it is for regular travelers.

Oops.

I did not know that I was basically smuggling cheap-ass grocery store wine (but it's Italian, so it's different!) into the country. I now know that "I'm sorry officer, I didn't know I couldn't do that" would not have saved my ass had they checked my bags, but the customs processing for crew relies on a trust-based system, not a "trust-but-verify" system. Once they hand your passport back, the transaction is over.

So I’m coming back through JFK. I clear customs. Nobody asked to lay eyes on my nineteen dollars worth of wine. I’m making a connection, which means I have to go back through security with my bag in this underground area of JFK smooshed between customs and the rest of the airport. I'm in that exhilarated-but-exhausted mood that long international flights usually put me in. I have to heave my suitcase to get it on the belt.

Unlike the other TSA x-ray encounter, I won't pretend like everything is completely normal. I couldn’t catch the scanner’s eyes by waving before I walked through the metal detectors , but I kept an eye on their body language and face. Finally, my bag hit the x-ray and it wasn’t half a split second before their head popped up and looked around for the lunatic with a case of wine in their bag: eyes wide, eyebrows halfway up his forehead. We make eye contact and I‘m like “I’m crew, I’m crew,” with a twinkly, exaggerated OMG sorry tee hee face, waving my badge in the air.

He laughed, and shook his head and waved me on. My bag came out the other side. I heaved it back on the floor, recombobulated myself, waved and blew a kiss of thanks as I scampered off to catch a flight to visit my family in another state for one night.

Back in my day, there was magic in the combination of having just enough pretty privilege and being able to—and wanting to—make people laugh. Maybe a hint of audacity. With enough charm, you can away with almost anything. Y’all don’t even know. I had the rizz, the razzle dazzle, the charisma. One day I swear I’ll be like “Auntie Maigen was a baddie” to my nieces and nephews (niblings?) or whatever the kids are calling hotties in the future.

That TSA agent was looking at me like: Ma’am. You crazy. But, also: no further questions. No “ma’am, why do you need twelve bottles of wine?” or "Ma'am, this is an unreasonable amount of liquid."

The very next day I had to turn around and head back to New York for another trip. The TSA agents at the CLT airport headed back to JFK didn’t blink an eye because they saw the secret signal for indicating “crew bags coming through” to the X-ray worker.

And because I am generous (and maybe my bag was getting a wee bit heavy), I gave a bottle to the flight attendants working that flight so they could enjoy it on their layover.

It just felt like the right thing to do.

Morally.

Spiritually.

Logistically.

I put the rest of those bottles of wine in a box under my twin bed when I got back to my crash pad in Kew Gardens. It was lovely to share one with friends the evening we got back from a trip at the same time over the next few months.

*Airport Codes and Other Abbreviations

• PAX is shorthand for "passengers."
• CLT - Charlotte Douglas International Airport (Charlotte, North Carolina)
• LHR - Heathrow Airport (London, United Kingdom)

**Another Realization

It literally just occurred to me on the second edit that this whole situation might also be seen as drug smuggling behavior and yeah, looks highly suspicious!!