If I had known that all it took was a hockey stick...

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... I would have started carrying one with me years ago.

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So, I'm in Maryland for work, and we're out to dinner at a fantastic sushi place next to the hotel, and we're drinking wine and swapping stories. One of my co-workers tells us about her experience in the BWI airport last week.

This coworker plays ice hockey, and had a hockey stick with her on her flight back home to Toronto. [Don't ask why she had a hockey stick with her while working in Maryland - it lengthens (and is not integral to) the story].

As she walked through the airport, hurrying to her gate, my coworker said she was stopped at various points along the way by at least a dozen different men who went out of their way to cross the terminal and strike up a conversation with her and ask her inane questions about hockey. All this male attention in the airport was new to her, and she's been flying in and out of BWI every week for months. But this was the first time with a hockey stick.

I was generous and gave these fellas the benefit of the doubt, theorizing that it was because she was carrying something sports-related, and men love to talk about sports. Or perhaps seeing someone carrying an ice hockey stick in Baltimore in July is just so unusual that people can't help but ask questions. But all the questions were coming from men, which was the unusual part.

Our male dinner companion had a different theory, which took him all of two seconds to share. "It's a phallic symbol", he said. "Men can't resist that".

Oh.

I am so naive.

But the scales have now fallen from my eyes.

"Sure -- anything will do. Walk through the airport with one of those tubes that carries blueprints -- that'll work, too."

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So, anyone know where I can get one of those tubes that carries blueprints?


;-)

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