So You Go Through Luggage?
When you tell someone you work in trade compliance, you get the exact same reaction at least once a month:
“Ohhhh. So you go through people’s luggage?”
For the record: No.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But I’ve stopped fighting it. I can see it in their eyes—they’ve already written and directed the whole movie.
In their version, I work at the airport.
Blue gloves. The snap. The little chemical swab.
They picture me unzipping their bag, holding a travel-sized bottle of Head & Shoulders up to the light like a jeweler appraising a flawless diamond. I find the one loose, rogue sock. There’s always one loose sock. I don’t ask questions.
They think I’m the guy who confiscates a souvenir snow globe from a grown man and watches something inside his soul die. They think I have a wall of confiscated BIC lighters at home, and I don’t even smoke.
They think I went to school for this. That somewhere in a drawer, I have a diploma that reads: Bachelor of Science, Other People’s Underwear. They genuinely believe the absolute highlight of my fiscal year was the guy in Terminal 4 who forgot he packed a machete.
Meanwhile.
Before my coffee finished brewing this morning, I reclassified a shipment of surgical-robot optical assemblies. Chapter 90, not 85. Saved the client a quarter of a million dollars with a single footnote.
Then I clawed a seven-figure duty-drawback refund straight out of the jaws of U.S. Customs. With interest.
I moved more money before lunch than that entire airport terminal sees in a calendar year.
But sure, Brenda. Socks.
Now—here is where it gets uncomfortable for both of us.
I do go through luggage.
Except yours is forty feet long, made of corrugated steel, and currently floating on a container ship off the coast of Long Beach.
And if you lied about what’s inside—if you swore under penalty of perjury that those disposable vape pens were just “flashlights,” or if your “hand-carved 18th-century antiques” actually rolled off an assembly line in Shenzhen last Tuesday…
I will open that bag.
I will find your one loose sock.
And it is going to cost you two million dollars.
So yes, Brenda. I go through luggage. I just need a harbor crane to lift mine.