Apparently being a geek was never more threatening to national security. Well that’s what staff at Heathrow’s, now notorious Terminal 5 seem to think.
Brad Jayakody, an IT consultant was stopped at security and threatened with arrest because he was wearing a t-shirt with a picture of the baddest bay guy, Megatron, from the 80’s TV show Transformers, wielding a gun and looking menacing.
Our friend Brad was about to board a British Airways plane to
“Bloke starts joking with me is that Megatron. Then he explains that since Megatron is holding a gun, I’m not allowed to fly,” Jayakody wrote on his blog.
The most “stupid part” was that once he had removed his T-Shirt to avoid security staff’s claim that it could cause offence, Jayakody was then confronted by an airport chief.
“The supervisor comes over and is ….telling me if I put the shirt on I’ll be arrested. I then told him that I wasn’t going to waste time arguing with him.
“With hindsight I should have said, yeah arrest me; great publicity for you guys [Heathrow operator BAA] to arrest a bloke wearing a transformers (sic) t-shirt.”
BAA has since said it is probing whether the incident could be categorised as one where a passenger is asked to remove their top because it shows a bomb or rude word.
“If it’s offensive, we don’t want other passengers upset,” a spokesman for BAA reportedly told Sky News.
But the IT consultant, who did eventually make it to Düsseldorf, remains puzzled about his treatment by BAA, although he is yet to file any formal complaint.
“It’s a 40-foot tall cartoon robot with a gun as an arm,” he said. “There is no way this shirt is offensive in any way, and what I’m going to [do], use the shirt to pretend I have a gun?”
How long will it be until T-shirts are sold with the warning “May cause offense, may cause you to miss your flight and may cause uptight morons to get their knickers in a twist”?
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