Status at the Airport: New "Checkpoint Friendly" Laptop Bags

Kevin Maney writes lustfully: I want one of the soon-to-be-available laptop cases that can go through the X-ray machine at airports with your laptop remaining inside it. This is not so much because I'm dying to avoid the annoying practice of having to take my laptop out of my bag, put it in a plastic bin, slide it through the machine, and put the laptop back afterward. I'd gladly trade that for having to take off my friggin' shoes.

There's something more important at stake here. Business travelers tend to be a competitive, type-A, status-conscious bunch. Like, you don't have Bose noise-cancelling headphones for your cross-country flight? Looooo-ser. Anyway, you just know that the savviest, smuggest, most self-important business travelers will immediately get a checkpoint-friendly bag. And they will smugly put their laptop bags, laptop inside, on the X-ray machine conveyor belt, just waiting for fellow travelers to notice and feeling so very clever for saving 15 seconds off their curb-to-gate time.

I really don't care about impressing my fellow business travelers. But the breed that will buy the first shipment of checkpoint-friendly bags -- I don't want to give them the satisfaction of being the only ones in line with the things.