Holidaymakers endured check-in desk torture when the “terror plot” affected London airports this summer. But the experience for business travellers was arguably even more of a nightmare, albeit without the screaming kids. It all came down to hand luggage.

Sure, there were some silly rules in the first week, such as the one banning passengers and crew from carrying contact-lens solutions. You have to wonder at the logic of the authorities trusting pilots with 30 tonnes of kerosene packaged up in a metal missile but not with a bottle of Optrex, but there you go.

The hand luggage rule at least made some sense in those early days: clear plastic bags only, everything else in the hold. For the holidaymaker, hand luggage is typically a bag holding toiletries and a copy of Heat magazine. But for the business traveller it’s a laptop PC.

First the good news: laptops are usually carried in padded bags that will resist rough handling. The bad news: the laptops themselves might not. It seemed inevitable that lots of checked-in kit would get damaged.

Curiously, this is not what seemed to happen. Instead, they simply went missing.

Now, I should admit to having worked as a baggage handler for four summers to fund myself through university. I wouldn’t dream of casting aspersions on this noble profession. But I could tell you some stories. For example, a dozen professional golfers once took a flight to Heathrow, yet only one set of golf clubs reached the baggage reclaim hall (Seve Ballesteros had taken the precautionary step of having all his clubs engraved). And a raid by Heathrow airport security once revealed that a brick used to prop open a door in the baggage handlers’ rest room was actually a gold bar that someone had painted red.

Like a set of golf clubs, a padded laptop carry case is immediately recognisable for what it is, and this makes it a target for the light-fingered. It was inevitable that many would get nicked.

Except that this doesn’t seem to have been what happened either. It appears that, like other luggage that went missing in August, many laptops simply flew around the world several times and are now finally arriving back home. But only a handful are being reclaimed by their owners.

Further investigation reveals that in a typical month at Heathrow, up to 120 laptops are handed in to lost property. But apparently, 40 percent of electronic items are never claimed, and mobile phones make up the bulk of these. Items in good condition are sold at auction if unclaimed within three months.

So if you thought your laptop that went missing during the security scare was crushed or ended up in the Atlantic, you’re almost certainly wrong. More likely, it is on a waiting list to be sold off cheaply to a shady buyer at auction, quite possibly with all your email, passwords and company data. Sleep tight.