Several years ago, I was getting ready to send my passport to the Indian embassy to get a visa and had put my passport in the big front pocket of my hooded sweatshirt. I stopped into a restroom to relieve myself on the way to the mail room. In the shuffling over the toilet, I managed to knock my passport out of my hoody pocket directly into the now very used toilet.
I dried it off the best I could and, using my fingernails, carefully dropped the passport into the envelope and sent it off to the consulate.
I still have the same passport and it’s sometimes fun to remember this event when an immigration officer is pawing my passport and giving me a hard time.
Now let’s see who remember this story at the next big keysigning.
That reminds me of the time we were traveling with our toddler daughter a couple of years ago, and her car seat triggered the bomb-detection equipment. It seems some urine leaked out of her diaper, and that’s what was being detected (the nitrogen compounds in urine are similar to those in explosives). The security guys said they saw a lot of that, but they had to run the car seat through the X-ray machine again.
So who knows, maybe someone will think your passport is a bomb, and then you’ll have to, um, explain yourself.
:-)
It’ll be interesting to see who refuses to take your passport…
Is this a new technique to encode a biometic-like DNA signature into passports?