It's pretty common to have anxiety when it comes to air travel: whether you're afraid of flying or just can't handle the chaos of checking in and dealing with lines, there are all sorts of stressors surrounding trips to the airport.
We can officially add one more source of angst related to airports: the possibility that baggage handlers might be stealing from your luggage.
There's no shortage of arguments in favor of, or opposed to, checking your luggage. Of course, if you're in a situation where you can't travel light, you'll have to check your bags — which means leaving them in the care of unknown baggage handlers.
The video, posted to TikTok by @xsir22 (who promptly deleted their account), was reposted by @realityeye1. In it, a ballpoint pen is used to unlock locked luggage, just by pressing the pointy end into the zipper.
The pen creates a break in the zipper, which then makes it easy to open the whole bag. Closing it up is just as easy: just zip it back up with no evidence of the tampering.
It's worth noting that none of your luggage is ever truly private when it comes to air travel. Authorities have the right to search your bags, and will even break locks if necessary to do so.
Most people have dealt with broken zippers before, but the idea of intentionally breaking — and then re-zipping — a zipper for nefarious purposes is definitely a novel one. The video makes it seem so easy.
The video demonstrates that zipped luggage is easy to break into, but it doesn't demonstrate how common — or uncommon — this practice might be. Definitive statistics are hard to come by, but on average, 5.69 bags are mishandled per every thousand passengers processed.
Maybe I'm just lucky, but I've never had a problem with checked baggage. At the same time, it requires an act of faith to entrust your stuff to a team of people you'll never see.
Watching it will either give you a vague sense of anxiety surrounding checked bags, or it'll give you a great life pro tip for if you ever need to break into someone's zipped-up bag for, uh, reasons.
The video throws an entire profession under the bus with no real evidence against them, which seems a tad unfair. What do you think of this? Will you re-consider checking your bags in the future? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
