If you have to change airplanes when returning to the United States from a foreign country, go through *any* airport but George Bush Airport. Because the intelligence level of the personnel is of such quality that making jokes in relation to the Airport name is criminally easy.
Shana and Gwen returned from their trip to Cancun and had to make their connection at GBA. They had an hour to make the connecting flight, but since Texas was their port of entry into the US, they had to clear customs.
So they went to the first customs guy. He asked them, among other things, if they had liquor with them. Shana, having no desire to lie, said, “Yes, two bottles.” Which she did. Nothing illegal about it.
But this apparently bewildered the customs guy, so he sent her to a second customs guy, who asked her the exact same questions. With time ticking away, she gave the same answers. He stared at her and said, “You have to be 21 to bring liquor into the US.”
“I am 21,” she said.
“I need to see your ID.”
She gave him her passport.
He stared at it. Stared some more. Stared some more. Looked up at her. Looked back down. Stared some more. More time ticked away. Finally:
“Who’s ‘David?'” he said suspiciously.
“That’s me! That’s my last name!” she said to someone who worked in international arrivals in an airport but was incapable of deciphering a United States passport.
More suspicious looks. “I need to see your Texas state ID,” he told her.
“I don’t have one.”
“Why not?” he demanded.
“Because I don’t live in Texas,” Shana said, watching her connection slip away and trying to keep her cool. “I live in Boston.”
He paused, considering that. Then he shook his head. “I need to see your Texas state ID.”
Shana snapped. “I DON’T LIVE IN TEXAS! I LIVE IN BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS! I CAN SHOW YOU A BOSTON STUDENT ID, OKAY?!”
She yanked out her Boston student ID, presenting it to an official for whom a US government passport wasn’t sufficient. He stared at it, gave it back, waved her and Gwen through…without ever having looked in the bag to see the alcohol.
Shana and Gwen then sprinted to the desk where they now had to recheck their luggage for the connection. They got to the desk. The woman behind the counter said, “Where are you going?”
“Boston,” they gasped, having dashed across the airport, having lost nearly half an hour to customs.
“Have you rechecked your bags?” asked the woman.
They stared at her. “No. That’s why we’re HERE.”
“Well, you’re never going to make your flight if you’re standing here,” said the woman.
At which point Shana nearly reached over the counter and beat the woman senseless, except she realized that apparently no one she’d encountered at George Bush airport had a lick of sense anyway. The woman then took the bag and threw it onto the carousel as if she were tremendously put upon and being made to do something far beneath her, rather than her job.
Despite the best efforts of George Bush Airport personnel, they made their flight with all of ten minutes to spare.
Oh…and Comedy Central never did film any kind of promo thing with them. What a waste of an opportunity. Heck, filming them trying to get back into the US alone would have been worth a half hour of laughs.
PAD
• 
Texans . . . eesh.
This could be the beginning of a great new addition to the Comedy Central line-up. Pitch it!
I for one gerw up in Texas (although don’t live there now) and can assure you not all Texans are like that. Personally i would blame the airport. I mean seriously, look who it’s named for, what else would you expect to happen?
Good thing is wasn’t the George W. Bush Airport, or they would have been “detained” indefinitely…
Funny how these things work… I am reading this entry a mere half an hour before I leave my house for the George Bush Airport… Hmmm….. Things weren’t this bad three years ago when I went through customs there, but then, three years ago the place was called the Houston Intercontinental. Makes one wonder…
Well Peter, it seems that it’s not just the GBA… the Dallas-Forth Worth Airport is horrible… and delayed us 3:45 hours…. why?
Because:
a) They couldn’t get anyone to bring the plane, which i could see about 100 feet away, to the docking station.
b) They had to re-de-ice the plane again because of the wait on having someone bring the plane to us
c) Had us bord the plane, de-ice it and had to get refueled because the de-icing took too long
d) They let this freakin old lady off the plane cause she was tired of waiting…
Well That experience was fun to read. I’m really sorry Shana and Gwen! had to go through that. (Sympathy Pangs…Can’t help it) even though I’ve never been in a situation like that at an airport before. But then again the only time where I missed a flight was a United in 1986. It was a connecting flight to Salt Lake City (and Home) because it connected from an LAX to Denver flight. (It was more economical to fly further east to go west, if you could believe it. But our connecting flight to SLC left in five minutes, and we had deplaned (when I say we, I mean my 8 year old self and my family.) on the other side of the airport. Now remember this was 1986 in the old Denver Airport, so we had managed to get to the plane 30 seconds before it took off. But I always wondered how our luggage enjoyed that flight, since we had to wait 2 1/2 hours for a Western Airlines flight to SLC.
Reading this makes me respect the airport I deal with normally, Baltimore-Washington International, that much more.
Six months after the 9/11 attacks, my girlfriend flew from there to Phoenix. She got caught with a pair of mini-scissors (to which I responded, “You brought WHAT on a plane?”). They caught it, politely informed her of the problem, and sent her back to the front of the line. She gave me the scissors, got back in line, and was off.
Nice, polite, vigilant airport people. That’s all I want. BWI is the best airport I’ve ever been in.
This is why I drive home every Christmas.
While the folk they dealt with certainly set new marks for being incompetent, ‘fraid I also think that allowing only one hour for a connection where they had to do all of 1) wait for baggage to be unloaded from plane one, 2) clear customs, 3) go from the international terminal to a domestic terminal (assuming Bush has separate ones, as most airports of that size do), 4) check luggage for domestic flight which now has to be scanned and matched to passengers, 5) clear security again (all baggage checks I’ve seen are on the other side of security from the gate), and 6) actually make it to the gate was just asking for missing the flight or at least getting very nervous.
While all my international flights so far haven’t involved making domestic connections coming back into the US, if I had checked baggage I would’ve allowed a couple of hours for the connection on such.
Sorry that ya’ll had probs at IAH.
But honestly, what do you expect when dealing with FEDERAL EMPLOYEES? Competence? Intellegence? Fear of not doing the job right and getting fired? They’re federal employees, it will take months for anything to be done to them, and even then will probably be done wrong.
I’ve never had a problem with Bush International, even had extremely competent help (from airline employees) when a guest of ours missed a flight because of delays with baggage checking.
Also, IAH is under all types of construction with a huge remodeling/construction project in the works. Can be a nightmare just getting into the right terminal from the ground right now.
But, they did catch their flight and made it home safe, right?
jeff
All the more reason why I’m going to NY next week by rail. Lewis Black probably said it best when he referred to airline security as paranoid & psychotic. Maybe if they could give us an idea of what they’re REALLY looking for, but I don’t even they know what they’re looking for.
BTW, don’t feel too bad about Comedy Central not doing a promo. The network decided not to pick up “Win Ben Stein’s Money” for another season a few months ago, so they probably decided that a promo piece would not have practical.
Still, the least they could’ve done is send Jimmy Kimmel’s cousin to Cancun to carry their luggage around.
Your story, PAD, doesn’t sound all that uncommon. Though I’ve never flown, I do surf the internet for several hours a day, and both Dave Barry, the Funniest Man in America, and irreverent internet funnyman Seanbaby have chimed in on this subject with their own experiences and those that were so ludicrous they made the news. You think your family had it bad? Check out these articles:
http://www.seanbaby.com/news/terrorism.htm
http://www.thewavemag.com/pagegen.php?pagename=article&articleid=22373
Sadly, Dave Barry’s column is not on the Miami Herald webpage, but I think Sean covered it nicely.
Proof again that alcohol makes people behave in a stupid manner. Though, I’ve never seen alcohol-induced stupidity without some portion of said liquid being consumed first.
Do your daughters ever get upset that their personal lives are material for your column?
Do your daughters ever get upset that their personal lives are material for your column?<<
I clear mentions of them first.
PAD
Yet another topic touched on by Dave Barry (at great length): If you can find it, the column he wrote about the time he picked his son, in junior-high at the time, up from school in a rented Oscar-Mayer Weinermobile is priceless.
Ah, but prior to the Dave Barry incident was the Mike Peters embarrasses his daughter incident.
Peters is known to be a big Superman fan, and there’s the well-known story of how he once perched on a several floors up window ledge at his newspaper, wearing a Superman outfit, just so he could enter an editorial meeting through the window commenting “Sorry I’m late; bad headwinds over Cleveland”.
Later on, his 14ish daughter made the mistake of phoning him at home, telling him she’d forgotten her homework, and he needed to get it to school “as fast as possible”.
So, he walks into her classroom with the homework, dressed in the Superman outfit, explaining that since it had to get there as fast as possible, naturally Superman was the fastest way to get it there.
http://www.verybigdesign.com/verybigblog/archives/000863.shtml is my recent story with the “Homeland Stupidity” people.
Penn (of penn and teller) has a GREAT story too: http://pennandteller.com/sincity/penniphile/federalvip.html
and this is a follwoup: http://pennandteller.com/sincity/penniphile/roadpennsecurityedition.html
As one who once lived in texas, I can attest that not all texans are like that…why do you think most texans voted for him for president?
to get a new governor of course.
but seriously, customs people all over seem to lack average “street intelligence” like they were raised on customs books and not let to interact with real people or something.
as a for instance last summer when I tried to go to canada on vacation.
Now, I was raised in ohio, used to go to canada quite a few weekends with friends while in school so I expected no problems.
for some reason out of a whole busload of people I got “detained” and asked a whole list of questions and why I wanted to go to Canada and who I was going to see and the like.
it was the questions on how much money I had in my bank account among others that I found personally invasive and really irrelevent.
like what does that have to do with anything?
What I found most annoying is that I spent 15 minutes answering THEIR questions after which they denied me entry and refused to answer any of mine.
mostly like “why?”
(the man who “interviewed” me said he felt that I didn’t have enough money to support a two week vacation in canada and felt I would be a drain on his country’s economy” which was a crock because I had more than enough money to feed myself should anything go wrong and I already had a place to stay and had no worries about any out of pocket expenses, because it was already taken care of.)
this all is an oversimplification of a wonderful afternoon I spent trying to go on vacation this summer.
After the “interview” I was dismissed.
they called a cab and told me that the cab would take me back into the city to wherever I wanted to go.
The canbbie on the other hand had other ideas, stating that they paid him only to take me back across the border to the us side ( whole 125 feet or so) after which he stopped the cab and told me that if I wanted to go any further he would have to start the meter.
I just got out and not only did I have to load and unload my own baggage he expected a tip for his generous service. pfft.
getting back on the bus to go back home was another matter. they did tell me I could get refund for the half of the trip that wasn’t complete, but to get anywhere else fromw here I was I had to purchase a whole other ticket.
ok that long winded diatribe wasn’t as funny as peter’s story but it was nonetheless as irritating or more than his daughters must have felt.
I fly through IAH pretty regularly and have never been anything but pleased with the service.
Now, I’ve never flown internationally into IAH, so I don’t know how customs is, but domestically, Continential is very efficient, to the point that I almost do not stand in line; I arrive at the terminal, walk up to a eticket kiosk (regardless of whether I’m checking luggage), walk through security, and walk to the gate. No waiting. That, to me, is good service.
Stupid? Yep. However, try leaving Bun-Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv sometime. That makes the delays in the US seem minor by comparison.