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ceased to be our main concern when, after about an hour over the Pacific, which is famous for not having anyplace on it where you can land, the pilot announced that we had a “minor engine problem.”
MODERN AIRPORT DESIGN

    7. So we turned around and headed back toward, you guessed it, San Francisco, which we were beginning to think of as home. All the way back the pilot kept reassuring us about how
minor
this engine problem was, so you can imagine our excitement when we got to the airport and saw what appeared to be the entire San Francisco Fire Department lining the runway.
    8. We landed safely and scuttled off the plane to be greeted, once again, by the devil, who was now being assisted by a witch. Of course by this point, Hell seemed like a major improvement over commercial air travel.
    9. Several hours later our pilot led us onto yet
another
plane. By this point a lot of people had dropped out of the flight, but we were determined to see what would ultimately happen, with a lot of smart money betting that this would become the first commercial airliner ever to be sucked into a black hole. During the Preflight Safety Lecture—I swear this is true—the flight attendant said, “If you gotta go, go with a smile.”
    10. We took off from San Francisco again andflew back out over the Pacific, where, to judge from the amount of “turbulence,” we flew smack into a whole
herd
of airborne water buffalo. The in-flight movie was
The Dead Poets Society
.
    11. We landed in Honolulu, 21 hours after we left Miami. To apologize for our inconvenience, the flight attendants gave us coupons that were good for discounts on future flights, although they knew full well that we were all planning to return to the mainland via canoe.
    I do not mean to suggest here that all flights take this long to reach their destinations. Some of them
never
reach their destinations. And I understand that there are even some, the ones that I personally am not on, that arrive right on schedule. You just never know, which is why air travel is the ongoing adventure that it is.
AIRPORT SECURITY
    The important thing to remember about airport security procedures is that they have been created for
your protection
. Sure, it can be annoying to have to stop at the security checkpoint when you’re on a tight schedule, but look at it this way: If the security personnel do their job properly, they just might cause you to
miss your plane
, thereby possibly saving your life.
    The heart of the airport security system is the metal detector , a device that shoots invisible rays into your body. These rays are perfectlyharmless, according to security personnel, although you notice that THEY never go through the metal detector. In fact, when nobody’s around, they use it to cook their lunch. So most travel experts recommend that, to avoid turning your internal organs into baked lasagna, you go through the detector as fast as possible, maybe even back up fifty yards or so and get a running start.
    The purpose of the metal detector is to make sure that you’re not carrying a bomb or a deadly weapon or a set of car keys. If the detector detects one of these items, it will beep; security personnel will ask you to place the item on a plastic tray and go through the detector again. Your item will be returned to you on the other side (“Wait, sir! You forgot your bomb!”).
How to Act While Going Through Security
    Security personnel are on the lookout for people who fit the Profile of Suspected Terrorists, which is as follows:
PROFILE OF SUSPECTED TERRORISTS
SEX
Male
AGE
15 through 74
LOOKS SUSPICIOUS?
Yes
    As a smart traveler who wishes to avoid the inconvenience of being taken to a small airless interrogation room and having electrical wiring attached to your various genitals, you should make every effort to avoid fitting this profile. This means that if you are, for example, a male, you should try to deflect the security personnel’s attention away from this fact via such