Poetic Licence: Luggage Lost in Time
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Your support makes all the difference.Although aircraft are unlikely to plummet from the skies, the Millennium Bug may well lose our airline baggage in a time warp. In recent tests, BAA found that when the clock was set to 1.1.00, its baggage-handling system sent luggage down the `mis-sort' chute
Your swivel-headed razor
The toothpaste and your towel
Your calculator, laptop and your socks
Surrendered at the airport
Are lost somewhere in time
Millennial gremlins sabotaged the clocks
And through the whirling vortex
Suitcases disappear
As down the time continuum they spin
The baggage handlers, helpless
Apologise at length
And swear to God they put the objects in
The highwaymen of Hounslow
Found luggage on the heath
Two hundred years before the airport came
The credit cards were useless
Pyjamas thrown away
But duty-free Jack Daniels worked the same
The coachmen and postillions
Along the Western Road
Once puzzled by the objects on the ground
Unpacked the foreign Walkmans
Then drove to Drum 'n' Bass
In tracksuits and the baseball caps they found
A horrified historian
Presents to a museum
Possessions pipelayers found beneath a floor
The Restoration trainers
Some Georgian shaving foam
Deodorant from the English Civil War
And down the sleeping centuries
The peace is then disturbed
As missing mobile phones begin to ring
But history's baggage handlers
Will answer much the same:
"Prithee sir - I have not glimpsed the thing."
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