This is a story you probably won’t hear everyday. Apple hosted its Design Awards ceremony last week, which was a pretty grandiose event, with the winners taking home arguably the coolest trophy known to man: a perfect cube with a glowing Apple logo as well as a Mac bundle.
However believe it or not the trophy caused the Game Collage developer who collected the award for his app Bobo Explores Light quite a bit of trouble, as he reveals on his company’s blog.
As he describes:
As I was heading back to Seattle from WWDC, I was only traveling with a small backpack. I bundled the Apple Design Award into a t-shirt when I packed that morning, shoved it into my backpack, and forgot all about it when I got the airport. The backpack went through the x-ray machine and showed up as containing a perfect, black square.
The guy watching the screen from the x-ray machine called for another guy, and another guy, and pretty soon there was small crowd scrutinizing the image. The backpack came out, I sheepishly admitted to being the owner, and I was taken aside. When the TSA folks pulled the cube from my bag, it glowed.
Whispers passed over the crowd. After I explained that the cube is from Apple, the security folks reverently placed the futuristic artifact into its own plastic bin and ran it again through the x-ray machine. This time, the other passengers got a glimpse of what the commotion was about and, once again, it was the glow of the cube readily visible as it entered and exited the x-ray machine that sent a wave of whispers through the sizable gathering.
Eventually, the cube made its way back into my bag, but the curious gazes kept coming. I suspect I will be reading about “intercepted alien technology of unknown origin or purpose” on the blogosphere soon. What can I say? Apple knows how to design their products.
It’s an amusing story, and it would be interesting to hear if any other wining developers had similar problems. You can’t blame airport security, as in an X-ray it would look suspicious, but their faces when they realised what it was would be worthy of a great picture.
