TSA searched my bags, found the board games (they look like a liquid on the scanner? Really? Are you that stupid or do you think I am?). Then to complete the purification ritual, they had to scan my board games, and the suitcase that they’d already excavated.
Totally Superfluous Agency.
you know, it wouldn’t be so bad if it was just faster.
I don’t care how fast the strip search is, it’s still demeaning.
It wouldn’t be so bad if they were actually interested in security rather than theatre.
see I never get the strip search, and do at times look rather terrorist like.
I’ve played the 20 questions game at schipol in holland, I’ve been frisked and wanded in london heathrow a bunch. I take my shoes off as a matter of habit now (even though I noticed some airports do that less). I’ve never had the strip search.
maybe I’m not sexy enough?
My *mom* gets strip-searched on a regular basis, when flying in or towards the US. Never anywhere else.
She also got detained at the border once because the customs agents didn’t believe her that she was giving a talk, and wasn’t getting paid a fee for speaking.
see, I knew I wasn’t sexy enough.
i suspect they just wanted to spend some time with ya ;p
But which board games were they? Some of those things are dangerous! *g*
I wish they’d use airport scanning for its actual purpose, rather than to intimidate people. Or take lessons from places like Heathrow that have been dealing with airport security issues with relative sanity for far longer than the US airports have cared. Seriously, it wasn’t that long before 9/11 that I went through a US airport and no one even looked up to see if I matched my ID.
The thing that really did it for me was when the TSA announced, on the same day: (a) a study showing that scanning the shoes has no effect on security; (b) a change in policy requiring all passengers at all airports to scan their shoes, “to improve safety.”
*massive eyerolling*
REPORTED
i dunno, MONOPOLY still scares the bejesus out of me, look what it did to the US economy…
At the risk of sounding annoying as well as the chance to play devil’s advocate can I just point out that the TSA agents are simply doing their job? And, although I don’t think you mean it this way, dare I say that it comes off as sounding just a tad elitist when you call the agents stupid for simply swabbing your boardgames — you didn’t miss your flight because of it, right?
I got stopped both going to and from home for Christmas because of wrapped presents (they actually didn’t unwrap them, which surprised me) heading to MN and my mom’s homemade lasagna set it off on the way back to Cali (you should have seen the look on her face when I opened the Tupperware container!)
Is it inconvenient? Yea. Is it a necessary evil? Arguable. Is it worth it to call the agents names who already have a shitty job in the first place? Not sure. Again, not trying to pick a fight, but my years spent working in a shitty customer service job in college has left me a bit sensitive.
I said they’re stupid if they think lots of small pieces of cardboard looked like a liquid. Said pieces of cardboard were in a transparent plastic container, they could see exactly what they were. They were absolutely not on the list of dangerous items. They were absolutely not a liquid, their ostensible excuse for opening my bags in the first place. I sincerely doubt anything in it is dense enough to obscure much of anything on an x-ray scanner. Or that a second pass through an x-ray scanner would reveal new information not already shown by visual inspection of the items in the transparent plastic container.
And the same materials have gone through security several times over in many different airports without this kind of action on TSA’s part.
Just because someone’s job sucks doesn’t mean I don’t get to identify their stupid actions as such.
Is security theater a necessary evil? No, it really isn’t. Evil, yes. Necessary, no. (Major, only by virtue of its volume, individual incidents are basically trivial.) I’m not objecting to them scanning my bags, note.
Your desire to stand up for the underdog is laudable, but this underdog is not worthy of your defense. =)
Maybe the security theater would be more tolerable if it were staged per my expectations.
I periodically want a swarthy arab man in full head-dress and dishdasha robe to be pulled aside and have a explosive belt and box-cutter dramatically stripped from him – it would make those of us in line cheer as the theater student from the local college was taken away in cuffs as per their daily show.
Fair enough 🙂
Thanks for putting up with my rant. It should be noted that this, after all, is your livejournal and should be a safe space for you to rant about a bad day at the airport or wherever.
And hey, maybe markormarky was on to something…perhaps they did just want to get you to themselves for a little bit longer! 🙂
Per my understanding of Board Games and Airplanes
This link explains why an adult playing board games may attract their attention:
http://www.airtoons.com/toons.php?toon=12
That is all.