BY CHIEF WHITE HALFOAT
BERRIEN SPRINGS—Leaders of the Berrien Springs SDA Church were pleased to announce Saturday that its BodyScanX is now fully functional. The aid to enforcing church standards is humming away in proper form and enhancing the spiritual atmosphere.
Church leaders installed the scanner, which sounds an alarm upon detecting any breach in church standards, after the church began suffering from a rise in unwanted visitors. Longtime members eagerly anticipated church attendance minus these plagues. And indeed, the scanner proved adept at turning away earring-wearing, necklace-wearing, tattoo-sporting, or meat-eating members and guests. But the scanner initially ran into some problems.
“The thing was too sensitive,” said James Dawson, head elder and local dentist. “Had no earrings, no necklace, no tattoos, and ate no meat, but I walked through right after installation and the alarm went off. We couldn’t figure it out until the LCD indicated the scanner was homing in on my Rolex Precision Oyster Chronometer, which shouldn’t have been a problem. The pastor just waved me through, but I had to live with setting the alarm off every Sabbath. It was annoying.”
Dawson was not the only church member to encounter problems with the scanner’s sensitivity. Numerous church members, whom even the pastor vouches for as “clean,” still set the alarm off, on account of $5000 watches, broaches, designer purses, cuff links, and key fobs to luxury vehicles. Even the pastor himself encountered problems.
“I’m well-aware of items that I should and shouldn’t have on me. Yet, it would not let me through without sounding. Eventually we figured out that the BodyScanX was identifying the adipose tissue in my abdomen and buttocks as animal fat, and flagging it as inappropriate per its filtering guidelines,” said Sam Davidson, pastor of the church. “That was unacceptable. About the only people the scanner was letting through were children.”
The church called technicians to fix the problem, since it had become a nuisance to regular members, but to no avail. The final straw came during the visit of conference treasurer Jack Hanson, who was stunned and offended when the machine flagged the key fob to his Mercedes SUV, as well as his wife’s diamond and gold broach and Louis Vuitton purse.
“That was embarrassing,” said Pastor Davidson. “We apologized, and told him that we knew he wasn’t wearing jewelry or eating meat or sporting tattoos, and that he was still very much welcome in our community.”
Out of frustration, the church board sent back to the BodyScanners Tech Department to recalibrate and desensitize their prized device. This week, the machine was delivered with the necessary fixes.
An excited Dawson announced, “This Sabbath, we’re pleased to re-launch the BodyScanX and we’re hopeful that its sensitivity problems have been rectified. We specifically told the manufacturers to only have the machine flag tobacco, traces of alcohol, meat compounds along with earrings, rings and necklaces. Those false alarms are a thing of the past. We’re pleased that we can resume enforcing standards without the unnecessary interruptions to our system. Now, we don’t have to worry about our own items and we can turn our focus on keeping the real offenders out.”
