Officials, the joy of border crossings

It was fun to read a story recently about the pleasure of dealing with border officials.

Getting into the US: always a delight

I liked the story because I’ve come across several experiences of that kind. Some faced by me, others by relatives. Some bad, a few good.

Let’s start with how my grandmother got her surname. She was a Lithuanian Jew, making it odd that her maiden name was Johnson. That came about when her mother turned up with her and her brother at border control in England.

“Name?” barked the official.

My great-grandmother spoke barely a word of English but she understood that.

“Sonnschein,” she said.

“Johnson it is,” said the official.

My grandfather, the husband-to-be of the newly renamed Johnson girl, was called Bannister. Just like Roger Bannister, the first man to run a mile in under four minutes. Both men were in reality called Bernstein.

That puts me in mind of the old joke of the Jew who appears before a judge, wanting to change his surname from Blumstein to Watson.

“Very good,” says the judge, authorising the change.

Six months later, the same man appears in front of the same judge, wanting to change his name again, to Richards.

“I understand your wanting to change your name from Blumstein to Watson, but why Watson to Richards?” he asks. 

“So,” explains the Jew, “when people ask me ‘yes, but what were you called before you were called Richards?’ I can say ‘Watson’.”

A less amusing border crossing came when I was leaving the US from Washington International airport back in the nineties, with a couple of clients. They were surprised at how cursory the checks on baggage were. Even the questioning was brief to the point of negligence.

“Don’t you carry out more serious security checks than that?” one of them asked.

“The bombs don’t get placed on planes here,” said the official, “that only happens in your countries.”

My client wasn’t ready to give up.

“But surely you have a responsibility for our safety, don’t you?”

“Well, I’m not the one who’s going to be flying,” she replied.

Ah, the age of innocence before 9/11.

I had a somewhat brusque welcome into Canada once, at Toronto. The official asked me what I was doing there.

“Business,” I explained.

“And what is your business?” she asked.

At the time I was working on systems for benchmarking hospitals against each other. It involved identifying examples of best practice and then seeing how close a client was getting to it. So maybe one hospital might be getting a particularly low rate of readmissions after a particular operation. If our client was doing less well, we’d try to find out why, and help them improve. That’s a fascinating but difficult challenge, especially given that one hospital might be seeing patients in a more serious condition than the other.

It’s not that easy to explain all that in a sentence or two. It isn’t like “my company hopes to launch a new brand of baked beans in your country”. It’s particularly hard when you’re jetlagged after a transatlantic flight. I rather stumbled and stammered through my attempt at an explanation.

“I can take you down the hall to an office where you’ll spend the next three hours being questioned, if you like,” she courteously explained.

A much more pleasurable experience happened when my wife Danielle and I were leaving San Francisco after our hugely delayed honeymoon. It happened about ten years after our wedding, mainly because Danielle was about ten months pregnant when we got married.

Danielle had added both boys (the one about to pop out at our wedding and the one who came eighteen months later) to her passport, so their photos were in it. 

The official gave us a beautiful and winsome smile.

“Where are these guys?” she asked Danielle.

It was a pleasure to explain to her that friends had taken them in and that we missed them, so that despite having enjoyed our visit to California, we were looking forward to getting home to them again.

Now to the story I read the other day. 

Tomás Navarro Tomás was a leading Spanish philologist and librarian. He ran the Spanish national library from 1936 to 1939, and also published a number of significant works on the language.

Tomás Navarro Tomás when times were good

This was the time of the Second Spanish Republic. It was the legitimate government that had appointed him, but to have supported it, as Navarro did, was a serious black mark in the eyes of the hard right military officers who rose against it in 1936, fought a bitter civil war, and eventually seized power across the country in 1939. In January of that year Navarro fled to the US with his family, since he might have faced execution if he’d stayed behind. 

More accurately, he might have faced assassination, since he’d committed nothing we’d regard as an offence, in a democracy.

He had his suitcases engraved with his initials. Which, of course, were TNT. 

You can see where this is going? Yep, that’s right. As he stepped onto US soil, he found himself summoned to an interrogation room where he was questioned about whether he was carrying high explosives. 

Wouldn’t it be helpful if terrorists always labelled their weapons to make it easier for officials to identify them?

Anyway, I found it particularly amusing to discover how terribly alert to terrorist threats US border people had been in 1939, over sixty years before 9/11. Isn’t it odd how they seemed to have lost all that seriousness by the time I was flying out of Washington International back in the 1990s?