Mistaken Identity

I remember traveling in an airport one time and being mistaken for a policeman. Well, that's not entirely accurate. You don't actually travel in an airport. Airports are where you wait to travel. Sort of like the turnpike, during construction season, is where you wait to drive. Foreward progress is possible but you have to break a few laws to do it.

So I'm in the airport, dressed for business, waiting to fly to yet another city. Also, I am a people watcher. I usually sit or stand slightly away from the group I am supposed to be mindlessly amassed with, and try to guess their back stories.

Sometimes it's easy. Like the newly weds, traveling to honeymoon at some exotic venue. Her new father-in-law is paying for the trip, having just made a killing selling defective toilets to a chain of retirement homes in the Bible-belt.

Or the nerdy looking guy on the cell phone who just invented a teleportation device that will make the trucking industry obsolete, creating a new category of gun toting, belt buckle wearing, country music listening, homeless people.

I know what you are thinking. How can you be so specific? a) There are many minute details that the average person sees but seldom observes and 3) I never let a single detail get past me.

Take that average looking man and woman over there. She is wearing faded jeans, one knee is slightly more worn than the other. She has a callus on the inside of her left index finger. And her hair, though well groomed, is obviously a quick rinse dye-job. When the man walks, his left toe turns slightly in and drags as he takes a step. He is wearing a very expensive suit but it is well worn and at least a decade old. They are trying to appear not to know one another but he occasionally looks directly past her at the large clock over her right shoulder. She pretends not to notice.

As a self trained observer, it is obvious to me that these two are desperate fugitives. The female just escaped from a secret government facility that warehouses all of the pre-cogs and t-k's who have been rounded up over the years. It is located in the hills outside of Atlanta and is simply known as The Institute. After she overpowered the guards with a powerful mind blast, her friend, who sadly realized at the last moment, that he could never really leave The Institute, psi-fried the security system in a shower of sparks, allowing her to slip into the night. The man she is traveling with is a suspect in the brutal slayings of 37 prostitutes in Salt Lake City. They hooked up over a cup of coffee in a diner near Decatur. Johnny Mathis was playing on the juke.

It is really quite elementary if you know what to look for.

So, I'm standing there, minding my own business, when this seventeen year old model/corporate CEO of a diamond mining conglomerate approaches me and asks if I am a policeman. I said I wasn't and she moved on.

Can you imagine someone mistaking me for a cop? I mean, what are people thinking?