🛂 Proving a Negative

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.