On Sat, Jun 6, 2009 at 7:23 AM, Mark Smith <[email protected]> wrote:
> Richmond, as you probably know, british customs & excise have all sorts of > powers that might not generally be considered consistent with a modern, > democratic civil society. > > Don't know why you'd single out British Customs, such powers are pretty typical for all Custom Services the world over. My own experience is that although the British Customs at time can be a little tedious I've never really had a bad experience, on the other had I've witnessed the following - I won't mention the particular cities because I don't believe it's relevant as I truly believe this could happen pretty well anywhere in the world. I've personally witnessed a Customs/Immigration Officer: spend over an hour reading the contents of an individual's day planner or diary. a passenger who on being told that he would have to pay duty on the big (2L) bottle of alcohol, argue with the C/I Officer and then eventually smash the bottle and pour the contents all over the tarmac. The C/I Officer then politely pointed out that the passenger had still imported the alcohol into the country and was still liable to pay duty on it. a diplomatic courier of some sort with a 'official' locked bag end up in an argument with a C/I Officer over his need to inspect the contents of the bag. The courier remained remarkably calm and politely kept pointing out the the C/I Officer had no right and no need to inspect the contents of the bag. The C/I Officer's blood pressure just kept going up and he demanded that he had every right to look into the bag, was not going to read any documents, just confirm that the bag just contained documents and nothing else. The C/I Officer sent a lackey to collect the bolt cutters. As the C/I Officer moved to use the bolt cutters the courier produced a firearm and made it very clear he was going to shoot!! the use of strippers to distract C/I Officers so that they weren't too interested in carrying out baggage inspections. No the girls didn't strip but they certainly exposed enough of their skimpy underwear to be very very distracting. Not really a story about frustrating C/I Officers but I figure Richmond if you really really don't want to have your laptop inspected for a lengthy period, if it's true about what's (not) worn under the kilt you could go for something similar, well maybe the polar opposite, that they become so disgusted that they don't want to go near you ;-))))) _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [email protected] Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
