Not the usual kind of story for this blog, but let me break the stream of practical content with something more personal.
I recently traveled from Budapest to Chișinău for a team-building trip. My passport happens to be a particularly “interesting” one — Russian. Since Russia has been stirring up separatism in Transnistria, Moldovan border control officers take extra time to double-check people like me.
So, unsurprisingly, I was invited into a little room for some polite questioning: Who am I? Where am I going? Why?
One of my colleagues had gone through the same routine earlier. While waiting, she left a bottle of water and a pack of cookies in the lobby. Later, when I flew in, she messaged me: “Hey, if they’re still there, could you pick them up?” Sure enough, after twelve hours in the “terrorist pre-screening lounge,” the two mystery objects were still sitting there. So I grabbed them.
At the end of my interview, the officer looked at me, then at the bag in my hands:
— Is this yours?
— Well, technically it’s my colleague’s. She forgot it and asked me to take it.
— What is it?
— Cookies.
— Really yours?
— Really! I can even show you the chat.
— Show me.
I open Telegram, making sure to click straight into the right chat — avoiding the ones where I’d been joking to friends that I was about to prove my eternal respect for Moldovan sovereignty. The officer glances at the screen, hands back my passport, and says:
— You do remember you’ll still need to leave Moldova, right?
— What do you mean?
— Well… if this isn’t actually yours.
At first, I thought he was accusing me of stealing someone else’s cookies. Then it hit me: from his perspective, a guy with a suspicious passport picks up a random abandoned package twelve hours later. Not the best look.
That night, I fully experienced what it means to prove a negative — trying to convince someone that the cookies weren’t a bomb, that I wasn’t a mule, and that I was just a guy picking up snacks for a colleague.