(Note: This isn't really a departure. But more, different material will find its way into these pages. Material in this new section, "Radio & Meter," comes from my day job driving a Yellow Cab in Charleston, SC. This is a good one to start it off, though I'm really cheating. I actually wrote this a year ago. But it still holds true, particularly my sense of wonder as I reread this.)

They were out there in their usual formation outside the terminal while I was dropping a passenger off at Charleston International Airport the other day. Black uniforms, Smokey The Bear hats, badges, the works. They're the faceless soulless folks who handle airport security, a job that has changed a lot in post-9/11 days.

They were there, doing whatever it is that they do, when I spotted her. Dressed like the others, in the uniform and Smokey hat, short, Hispanic, chatting a mile a minute with her coworkers. I was happy to see she's still there. Our paths had crossed a few months ago, and I'm glad she didn't get fired. Instead, she should be running the joint.

It had been a busy morning. One of those kind of days where everyone seemed to want to go to the airport, a good time to drive a taxi. I'd picked up a nice old gal at a downtown hotel, loaded her luggage, took her to the airport, offloaded. Good conversation on the 13-mile trip. After dropping her off I gave a cursory look at the back seat, made sure she didn't leave anything, and headed back downtown for another. This time a college girl wanting to go to the airport. She settled in her seat, and saw that something was stowed on the floorboard, under the passenger seat.

"Did someone leave this?" she asked, holding up a small bag.

Damn. I remembered the bag. It belonged to the nice old gal on my previous trip. I'm doing some fast figuring. The old gal would probably be in the airport's secured area by now, waiting for her flight. The bag looked important. I put it in the passenger seat, and when I dropped off the college girl I first tried to find the nice old gal (in the hope she was outside smoking a cigarette), then caught the attention of the nearest security person. It's the short Hispanic woman.

"We've got a problem," I explained. I showed her the bag. "Can you get this to her somehow?" Fortunately I had the name of the nice old gal and knew which airline she was using.

Once the passenger is in the secured area you can't hand her another bag, she explained. Against airport rules. Defeats the whole point of the secured area, which I understood. "Can you try anyway?" I asked.

We opened the bag. It's a small one, about the size of a lunch bag. It's insulated, and there's one of those Blue-Ice things keeping the contents cold. A checkbook. A couple of syringes. Several bottles of insulin. Yeah, definitely important stuff in there.

"I'll do everything I can," she said.

"Please." I gave her my name and dispatcher's phone number. "Let me know how it comes out."

Wasn't too long after that when I got a call from my dispatcher, reporting that the passenger and bag were reunited.

I don't know the name of the security person, and this is the first time I spotted her since that day. But folks like her are refreshing to run into. She isn't afraid to think, to bend a rule or three to get a job done. There are plenty of the other kind, where there's a rule book where their brains should be. Civil service jobs seem to attract an overabundance of that other kind. But no pre-employment screening system is perfect; occasionally a few real human beings slide in through the cracks.