While I took advantage of much confusion caused by an Asian family with three young children - little English, too many bags per person, open liquid containers, kids wandering off all over the place - and zipped though the T1 "one bag" checkpoint to the passport/boarding pass check, the wife failed to see the same advantage and waited patiently behind them only to get pulled by little Ms. Jobsworth.

I've always known that our regulation size carry-ons are topside for the current "allowed size", and that we'd be hard pressed to get them by on every occassion, so when I notice the wife looking at me with that "deer in the headlights" look I turn back to assist, determined to get her bag onto the flight if humanly possible and carefully secreting my own beside a stancion just to be on the safe side.

BAA staff member: "Your bag is too big"
Me: "No it isn't. It's a regulation sized carry on"
BAA staff member: "It has to fit in here"
Me (at this point attempting to stuff bag into sizer): "You've made these smaller than they used to be, haven't you!"

So I've got her bag partially into the sizer, but it's hung up on the legs on the bottom and by rings which hold the handle on the top, which all sit about half-an-inch proud of the bag surface.

Me: "You prepared to loose one of these sizers today when it gets checked in with our bag?"

I continue stuffing the bag into the sizer and figure out that if I rock it back and forth first the legs will clear and then the rings will clear. Eventually it's in the sizer and very slowly slides down and bottoms out. It's a very tight fit.

Me: "See, it fits"
BAA staff member: "But it's supposed to fit comfortably"
Me: "Well I'm very comfortable with the way that fits. Besides, where does it say comfortably in the regulations? You show me where it says that and I'll consider checking it"

So by this point Ms. Jobsworth is calling over her supervisor "Dennis" to come and adjudicate. But she's having a hard time getting his attention and it's too late for her as far as I'm concerned. I drag the bag out of the sizing frame as quickly as I'm able, grab the wife's hand, and we set off at a brisk pace for the next checkpoint, all the while (heeding the sage advice from this board) ignoring her alternating demands that we stop and increasingly shrill cries for Dennis to come to her aid.

So us one, bag Nazis nil in this particular instance. But had it been my bag that got pulled up, it would have never fit - the legs on it are about 2 inches longer than the ones on my wife's bag. We would have also been in huge trouble had the sizer not been an open frame, where I couldn't grab the bag anyplace I liked to manipulate it (like the one wrapped in blue perspex sitting outside of T1 Terraces, for example). So I think for sanities sake, we need to consider getting bags that are just a hair smaller.