So there we were at a fairly small airport in Long Island, our preferred means of departing the area by air as opposed to the more busier, more hectic JKF or LaGuardia, as casa David prepared for our annual pilgrimage to Florida (followed by my continuation to the San Diego con.)
We encounter a huge line waiting for curbside check-in, but the line inside seems no shorter, so we wait. And wait. We inch forward. After about fifteen minutes of waiting, some guy steps in back of us. Apparently he doesn’t realize that he’s cutting in line, because there’s ten people behind us. It’s just that the woman behind us hadn’t yet moved forward because she had several suitcases to maneuver. Kathleen points out to him that he’s cutting in line and indicates where the actual end is. His response? He starts cursing at her, telling her to go f*** herself.
I immediately round on him and tell him to back the hëll off. He tells me I should mind my own business. I tell him if he starts cursing out my wife, he’s made it my business. Our faces are literally inches apart as, out loud, I’m hurling profanities at him as fast as he’s tossing them at me, and I’m thinking My God, where the hëll are all the cops you always see patrolling the place? Reading the new Harry Potter book? He informs me I have no idea who I’m f***ing with, and then heads to the back of the line. People are looking at me and, looking for a reality check, I say, “Was it me?” And they smile and shake their heads and say, “Noooo…it wasn’t you.”
I’m thinking, “How could this day get off to any worse of a start?”
We finally get to the front of the line and they won’t check in Kathleen. Caroline and I are free to go, but they insist that Kath has to go stand on the line INSIDE the airport and present further ID. I say, “We already waited once; it’s insane that we’d have to wait on ANOTHER line.” They just stare icily at Kath and say they can’t do a thing.
And I’m thinking, It can’t be what I think it is.
After losing another twenty minutes of time, and with our flight set to depart in twenty minutes, we finally learn that it’s exactly what I’d worried it was:
“Kathleen David” is apparently a similar name (not even the same: Similar) to someone who is a suspected terrorist. As a result, Kathleen is on a No-Fly list. A woman who doesn’t have so much as a parking ticket in her history is now being told she has to allow another HOUR of time at airport check ins so that she can stand on long lines and present additional identification to prove she’s not someone else with a similar name who might or might not have done something. The ONLY reason we managed to make our flight was because Caroline was in a stroller and they had a separate, and much shorter, line through security for people with wheelchairs or strollers.
They gave her a piece of paper with a number to call to have herself removed from this list. I am, frankly, less than hopeful that this will be resolved quickly and efficiently. Has anyone else been in this situation? How did it turn out?
PAD
• 
Posted by Scott at July 23, 2007 03:08 PM
Well, I, my father, and brother, have all had to go through extra hassles at airports because terrorism suspects on the “No Fly List” supposedly share our names. I’m Scott Jones. They are both Charles Jones. When you see in the newspaper terrorists arrested, how many of them have been named Jones, anyway?
Only Bugs and Daffy know for sure. 🙂
“When you see in the newspaper terrorists arrested, how many of them have been named Jones, anyway?”
Talk to people in the midwest, rather than the middle east. Like those people in Indiana.
Just how many archaeology jokes do people living in that state get, I wonder. Or jokes about living in a state named after the dog.
I hear the TSA confiscates Holy Grails at the checkpoint, but you can just buy an Ark of the Covenant from one of the shop and open it right up.
Next time book your flight out of Phoenix. Seems they just kind of prop the door open and leave you to check yourself in at night.
I,m hoping that a major shake-up in this security
B.S. is not far down the road.
Your kung-fu is pretty strong for not physically assaulting a stranger who gets in your wife’s face like that, seriously.
I am not inspired with confidence here, considering how much Japanese stuff (including CDs and DVDs) I’ll be eventually hauling home. Maybe by the time I return to the States, things will have lightened up a little.
Maybe.
Or maybe I should just ship everything home slow freight…
This has never happened to me, but here’s the exchange running through my head at the moment:
Loud Úšhølë Line-Jumper: “You have no idea who you’re f***ing with!”
Me (6’2″, 200 pounds, in a deliberately low and even tone): “No, I don’t. Why don’t you take out some ID and show me, then, big shot?”
Bill Myers: It is also worth noting that he crashed into the ocean and died. Very unfortunate, isn’t it? Perhaps his training was not quite up to the challenge. Saying that he was cleared to fly by the FAA is about as persuasive as noting that a high percentage of fatal car crashes involve people with driver’s licenses.
His eyes looking at the displays
His hands and feet on the controls
His, His wife’s and his sister-in-law’s bodies hitting the ocean.
Boom!
If the terrorists really want to mess with us, they should name some of their terrorists, John Smith or Elizabeth Jones. Then imagine all the people that would have to go into the suspected lines.
Posted by mushroomer at July 24, 2007 03:50 PM
If the terrorists really want to mess with us, they should name some of their terrorists, John Smith or Elizabeth Jones. Then imagine all the people that would have to go into the suspected lines.
How about Eric Robert Rudolph or Timothy McVeigh. You would think the line is long enough…..
Jeffrey Frawley: “Saying that he was cleared to fly by the FAA is about as persuasive as noting that a high percentage of fatal car crashes involve people with driver’s licenses.”
What is or is not persuasive to you is of little consequence to me. That JFK Jr. was considered qualified to fly under the weather conditions prevailing on the night of the fatal crash suggests that his behavior may not have been “reckless.” That is worth noting, and therefore I have noted it.
By the way, whatever you think of JFK Jr., you’re being awfully crass given that someone claiming to be a former friend/acquaintance of the man’s is reading this thread. As someone who holds himself up as the “behavior police” one would think you’d try to adhere to a higher standard of behavior. Even if JFK Jr.’s demise was the result of foolishness, there’s no reason to gloat.
For a while there I had this haunting vision of you never leaving the airport:
And the Davids, never leaving, still are pleading, still are pleading…
*Shudder*
Cue the Kingston Trio’s rendition of M.T.A
Okay, this is not quite the worst airline story ever, but this is still pretty bad —
On Monday I got up at 3 a.m. in order to make a 6 a.m. flight from Rochester to New York City. While there I joined a couple of colleagues and together we participated in a sales meeting with an executive at one of the accounts to which I am assigned.
My colleagues and I had a brief internal strategy meeting afterwards, and then had lunch. I then proceeded to hail a cab and got one on the second try. I got to Laguardia with time to spare. In all, a really, really good day.
Then my flight back to Rochester disappeared from the monitor at the gate. And then I found out that my flight had been cancelled.
I went to the ticket desk to find a seat on another flight to Rochester. I was informed that ALL flights to Rochester had been cancelled due to weather.
I am told that the weather in Rochester was just peachy, by the way. It was the weather in NYC that was the problem, apparently.
Anyway, I managed to get on a flight to Buffalo, although it was delayed four times and didn’t take off until 8:30 Monday evening. I got into Buffalo after 10 p.m. and had to rent a car so I could drive an hour to the Rochester airport — where I was supposed to go in the first place! — drop off the rental, get my car, and drive 30 minutes back to my house.
By the time I got home it was nearly 1 a.m. I realized I had been awake for nearly 22 hours. I was unable to fall asleep, mind you, until about 2 a.m.
I called and told the boss I’d be late for work this morning. And I was.
Rob in Japan – Wanted to reply directly, but couldn’t find an electronic mail address on your site. Yes, by all means ship yourself the stuff, it’s what I do, it saves endless hassles at the airports and borders. I’d recommend the Japanese post office’s SAL service which is faster than surface mail, but cheaper than air mail.
One of my neighbors suffers from the same situation of being on the no-fly list. His name is “Jose Rodriguez,” which as you can no doubt infer is a fairly common name of Hispanic origin. Every time he goes someplace on an airplane (which is frequently; he travels a lot for his job), he has to go through the same rigamarole. Even at the airports where he regularly flies out of, where the security guys have come to recognize and know him, he still has to go through the entire process (though at places where security recognizes him, the process is significantly expedited). He’s been trying to get off the list, to no avail, for something like four years now. Don’t even get me started on what one of my other neighbors -an Iranian expatriate and nationalized American citizen- has to go through any time he travels anywhere on a plane… and he’s not even ON a no-fly list.
For what it’s worth, if airports are found to not properly process their passengers under Homeland Security regulations, they get HUGE fines levied against them. The burden of that security work is usually passed on to the individual airports (many of which don’t have the budgets for it) under the rubric of Homeland Security, and that extra work is only lightly suplemented by federal funds. Considering the financial hit almost all airlines have taken post-9/11, budgets are already stretched thin as it is. So be aware that a lot of this frustration is shared by the airport employees who have to enforce the Homeland Security regs with inadequate staff and budgets. To a large degree airports don’t want to be doing what they’re doing to you, either.
WAY TO COWBOY UP, PAD! You you stand what, five foot something? 🙂 Guess this means that you’ll be flying outta the more busier, more hectic JKF or LaGuardia now. 😀
Later
Big Dee
WAY TO COWBOY UP, PAD!
And you’re how tall? Five foot something? 🙂 And you guys with shouting face-to-face. He must have be vertically challenged as well. 😀
Sorry to hear about your problems. Guess this means that you’ll be flying outta the more busier, more hectic JKF or LaGuardia now. 😀
Later
Big Dee
Bill Myers: There’s a difference between gloating and declining to worship a person. In any case, I am suspicious of anyone who claims he was a friend of JFK Jr., but who calls him “John John.” This was a grown-up, married man aged nearly 39, not the little boy many people remember and would like to think they knew. This grown man had not completed his instrument training and was not rated to fly in low visibility conditions. He crashed into the sea in low visibility conditions, but I suspect being fully competent with instrument flying might have helped with that.
In any case, any joke that starts off by naming Teddy Kennedy and goes on to mock his driving prowess is quite clear: It addresses Teddy Kennedy, and the man’s nephew’s death is not implied. If the family is due that kind of respect, we’d best not ever discuss strokes, old age, psycho-surgery, World War II, airplanes (many times over), firearms (at least twice), narcotics (very much so), skiing or natural causes (probably a few times). Perhaps we can just murmur the family name and touch our foreheads.
I won’t mock “John John,” but I do think that while it may be romantic to go out in a blaze of glory – I’d say like James Dean, but his accident was clearly the fault of the other driver – when others are also killed it makes one look more like a jerk and less like a romantic icon.
I’m thinking the similar name is probably Patty Davis.
They stopped Kathleen because, well, you know, Patty and Cathy are sisters…….
(References probably too old, like me, for younger readers to understand.)
Cousins, dammit, not sisters.
References are REALLY hard to get when they are wrong.
Not just cousins, dammit, identical cousins all the way,
One pair of matching bookends, different as night and day.
Just sayin’.
To the question as to “why don’t we arrest terrorists if we have a list?” the answer is the list is almost by definition entirely false positives. Homeland Security has a list of a hundred thousand Americans. These are people who have travelled to the Middle East on business, who have participated in events or groups critical of the government, who are related to or who have worked with people convicted of crimes in other countries, who are in the US on expired visas or are otherwise undocumented (or are thought to be undocumented), who have names similar to people who meet the above criteria, and so on. There is no evidence that most of these people are guilty of anything, because if there was anything resembling evidence, they would be arrested.
A small number of people on the list are people for whom the authorities have actual arrest warrants outstanding.
I would not be surprised if Mrs. David was put through this delay purely as harassment initiated by the person they argued with, which is why they hadn’t encountered this problem in the past. The reason not to surrender liberties to the government is that the “government” is composed of individuals who may use such powers for their own reasons.
Jeffrey, your ignorance is showing. At least, it’s showing to anyone with any kinf od familiarity with VFR classification, or what’s called Visual Flight Rules. JFK was trained and experienced to operate, but as anyone with even a few hours of flight experience can tell you, conditions can change rapidly and without warning, expecially in a coastal environment. The decision to depart was in all likelihood a sound one based on the weather forecast when they departed. Unfortunately, weather forecasts cannot predict when a sunset haze will develop that obliterates the abilty to tell where the horizon is. At that point, all a pilot has to rely on is his instruments, and JFK JR was not yet fullt trained in IFR…Instrument Flight Rules. All it takes is a moment’s confusion in an aircraft to enter a fatal spin or dive. On the other hand, a slight error in attitude will pitch the nose down in such a gentle dive that the occupants might never notice, and a VFR pilot might not think to check the altimeter until they hit the water.
So, whatever you think about JFK’s actions, I’d wager that most folk that hame some idea about it would find your opinion ignorant and unfounded.
As for the TSA and Dept. of Homeland Security…just take all those anecdotal stories and think about how the Bush administration wants to uncrease funding for it. It’s a cesspool and quagmire of lost tax funds hiding behind a good idea.
Jeffrey Frawley: “[JFK Jr.] was not rated to fly in low visibility conditions.”
As I stated earlier, under FAA rules JFK Jr. had the training required to fly in the weather conditions prevailing on the evening of his take-off. Bobb Alfred’s description of VFR vs. IFR, and the fact that conditions conducive to flying under VFR can rapidly turn into ones demanding IFR skills, is consistent with experts’ comments in all of the T.V. and newspaper reports I saw/read following this tragedy. This plane crash — and others like it — is more indicative of a need to re-evaluate FAA rules regarding amateur pilots than it is of any recklessness on JFK Jr.’s part.
By the way, Bobb Alfred, thank you for adding substance to this discussion. (In the future, may I just call you “Bobb?” 😉 )
Posted by: Jeffrey Frawley at July 24, 2007 10:36 PM
I won’t mock “John John,”…
Posted by: Jeffrey Frawley at July 24, 2007 03:10 PM
His eyes looking at the displays
His hands and feet on the controls
His, His wife’s and his sister-in-law’s bodies hitting the ocean.
Boom!
No, you would in no way mock him. Can’t even begin to see how anyone would think that you were.
For the sake of your friends, loved ones and others close to you, I hope that, God forbid, should anything ever happen to you due to things beyond your ability to deal with that comes about while you’re doing something you are able to deal with (say, a freak driving accident) that no one is ever as crass to them as you seem to enjoy being here. Tell me, do you really enjoy being this crass or is it something you just do without knowing that you’re doing it?
Jerry Chandler (addressing Jeffrey Frawley): “Tell me, do you really enjoy being this crass or is it something you just do without knowing that you’re doing it?”
It’s a natural outgrowth of Jeffrey’s hubris. He has an over-inflated sense of his importance in the grand scheme of things, as evidenced by this gem, from the “Car Toon” thread:
“If you can find anything in PAD’s comment to ‘bill’ that addressed “the rest of (bill’s) comment” – I suppose that would be his belief PAD’s animus toward President Bush is reflexive and uncritical – then I’ll be satisfied.”
As though satisfying Jeffrey Frawley means a dámņ thing to anyone other than Jeffrey Frawley.
He is quarrelsome and judgmental, and unaware of the limits of his own knowledge.
I’d use just “bobb” here, but there’s another bobb…strangly enough, not my dad, which means there’s now at least 4 or 5 “bobbs” that I’m aware of…but feel free to just use bobb.
VFR and IFR and meterological conditions are not something everyone’s going to be familiar with, so here’s an analogy most people can understand.
Most folks know how to drive a car safely. Most folks could even deal with a minor emergency in a car…avoiding a pothole, swerving to miss a child running into the street in front of you, etc. On the other hand, most people that failed to take those emergency corrective actions would not be labled irresponsible if they failed to do so in time.
Then there are instances of just plain accident. Like making a turn onto a one-way street, only to find out that you’re going the wrong way. Maybe you weren’t familiar with the area, maybe it was a little dark and you didn’t see the one-way sign. In most cases, you’ll realize the mistake, and correct it. In rare instances, you’ll pull in front of a speeding truck and be instantly killed in the head-on collision that you didn’t see, couldn’t see, and could do nothing to avoid once you turned onto that road. Are you an idiot because you made that mistake while your wife and her sister were in your car?
Most people would say “no,” understanding that it’s just an accident.
Posted by Alex von Thorn at July 25, 2007 12:17 PM
I would not be surprised if Mrs. David was put through this delay purely as harassment initiated by the person they argued with, which is why they hadn’t encountered this problem in the past. The reason not to surrender liberties to the government is that the “government” is composed of individuals who may use such powers for their own reasons.
Do you think someone like that horses @$$ would have that kind of “pull” to be able to instigate such a response?
“If you can find anything in PAD’s comment to ‘bill’ that addressed “the rest of (bill’s) comment” – I suppose that would be his belief PAD’s animus toward President Bush is reflexive and uncritical – then I’ll be satisfied.”
Read that last night, and it struck me how there always seems to be someone around here trying to dissect the posts with an electron microscope so that the posts say exactly what the new poster wants it to say when that’s usually the farthest from the initial posting’s meaning.
And, Bill, I don’t know that Jeffrey has an over-inflated sense of his own importance. It usually seems that if anything, he vastly underestimates the intellectual development of they who he is speaking, well, at, since most of his posts are delivered in the manner of either Sermons on the Font or infomercials. At least, that’s what it seems to me. To borrow a phrase, your mileage may vary.
Darn it, meant to add this to that last thing.
Pat, while I agree almost completely with what you put in, if anything, I can see that kind of reaction putting said guy on the list, as opposed to Mrs. David.
Posted by Sean Scullion at July 26, 2007 02:11 PM
Darn it, meant to add this to that last thing.
Pat, while I agree almost completely with what you put in, if anything, I can see that kind of reaction putting said guy on the list, as opposed to Mrs. David.
Thats what I was thinking. If there ever was a reason to thoroughly give someone the once over I think @$$ face gave it.
Pat Nolan, @$$face better be careful where he pops off in the future. When I was in Laguardia on Monday I noticed the airport was being patrolled by armed U.S. soldiers. And I ain’t talkin’ handguns. They were carrying big, bad, mother-effing high-powered rifles.
I don’t know when this started, but they weren’t there in the spring of this year.
“Sermons on the Font”
That’s good. I’m tucking that one away for future use.
Say a silent prayer to Audumbla, Greek goddess of travel, for my safe return from yet another road trip–this time from NY to NC for the weekend (and back again). Audumbla has been pretty slack on the job thus far since my drives to virginia and Montreal have been beset by tire blowouts, traffic jams, and long lines at the border.
It has been brought to my attention that, far from being the Greek Goddess of travel, Audumbla is a giant cow who emerged from the ice in Nifheim at the creation of the world. She saved Ymir, the first of the Frost-Giants, from starving to death with supplies of fresh ice cream from her chilled teats. Well, I feel somewhat foolish at this point.
The Greek god of travel is Hermes, I think. If it isn’t, it oughta be — he was certainly the fast mofo of the pantheon.
(Personally, I’ve always preferred Hermod, the Norse messenger of Odin. Dude got to ride an eight-legged horse. How cool is that?)
I’m flying out to southern CA next week for a conference; I’m hoping a lot of these horror stories don’t materialize, but plan on bringing a LOT of reading material just in case…
TWL
Bill Mulligan, I left a message with someone at the number you gave me just a minute ago. Now I am going to have you put on a “no-fly” list.
(Hopefully that last part will allow me to camouflage that personal message as something related to the topic.)
Tim Lynch — airports are a tangled mess of arcane rules and incredibly complicated government and private-sector bureaucracies, now with the extra-added entanglements of under-funded and badly executed anti-terrorism efforts.
What I’m saying is — what could possibly go wrong with such a system???
Tim, Ihope you don’t mind me barging in, but to answer Friend Myers–all that you spoke about, plus they who are among the under-funded, running into a guy, nice though he is, named Lynch? I can unfortunately see them becoming an unruly mob.
Bad choice of words, that.
Hmm. A tangled mess of arcane rules, overly complicated, using words and phrases that no one in their right mind understands—
My god, the wizards are running the airports!
(btw, Tim, I hope it all goes smoothly for ya. Thinking of Hermod always reminds me of the Witchsmeller episode of Black Adder. “Out in Cornwall, someone saw a horse with two heads and eight legs!” “Two horses, standing next to each other?”)
Tim, Ihope you don’t mind me barging in, but to answer Friend Myers–all that you spoke about, plus they who are among the under-funded, running into a guy, nice though he is, named Lynch? I can unfortunately see them becoming an unruly mob.
Bad choice of words, that.
Hmm. A tangled mess of arcane rules, overly complicated, using words and phrases that no one in their right mind understands—
My god, the wizards are running the airports!
(btw, Tim, I hope it all goes smoothly for ya. Thinking of Hermod always reminds me of the Witchsmeller episode of Black Adder. “Out in Cornwall, someone saw a horse with two heads and eight legs!” “Two horses, standing next to each other?”)
(btw, Tim, I hope it all goes smoothly for ya. Thinking of Hermod always reminds me of the Witchsmeller episode of Black Adder. “Out in Cornwall, someone saw a horse with two heads and eight legs!” “Two horses, standing next to each other?”)
PT Barnum advertized “A horse with his head where his tail should be”
It was a horse with his tail tied to a post.
Barnum also had the famous “Cherry colored cat” which was a perfectly ordinary black cat, the color of black cherries.
You could get away with all manner of clever šhìŧ back then.
Apparently JFK Jr. believed he was capable of flying under the circumstances. Most definitely he flew into the ocean, killing himself, which was his own business, and two others, which made him a jáçkášš. He was qualified to fly under clear conditions, but not the conditions he found himself in. If conditions necessitate instrument flying, it is a dámņëd good idea to know how to do that and to have the certification to prove it.
Bill Myers: If it is so offensive to you that someone should care for his own opinion, just why is it that you feel like expressing your own? Sometime last year PAD stated authoritatively that no one ever convinced anyone of anything. I hope that he would not repeat that now, because it tends to undercut this whole business of blogging and expressing oneself. A truly solipsist view suggests one should just close one’s eyes and thing to oneself of oneself, rather than discussing matters with other people. Bill, I would be surprised if you have never had your mind changed by someone else’s arguments, but I suppose it’s possible.
Jeffrey, you’re just plain wrong. He wasn’t qualified to fly under “clear” conditions. He was quaified to fly under Visual Flight Rules (VFR) conditions. From my understanding of the report, conditions on that day were “clear.” The problem was that the horizon lacked definition, and without that reference, any pilot not rated on instruments might have difficulty maintaining a level orientation.
Or in other words, flying ain’t “like dusting crops, boy.”
It’s not just JFK JR that thought he was trained for that day’s conditions…it’s every other pilot, the FAA, and a good number of people that don’t know any more than the official reports. He wasn’t drinking, he wasn’t being reckless or careless. He was unlucky. Accidents do happen, and not everything is always someone’s fault.
So, is it the fact that others were in the plane with him and were also killed that makes him a jáçkášš?
Jeffrey Frawley: “If it is so offensive to you that someone should care for his own opinion, just why is it that you feel like expressing your own?”
I didn’t criticize you for expressing an opinion. I criticized you being excessively judgmental and unnecessarily quarrelsome. There is a difference.
Jeffrey Frawley: “Bill, I would be surprised if you have never had your mind changed by someone else’s arguments, but I suppose it’s possible.”
It’s more than possible. It’s happened in this very blog numerous times and remains on record for all to see.
These airport horror stories certainly hit home. My husband and I are always ‘selected’ for ‘special processing’ when we fly. We ended up on someone’s watch list — Alex is quite right about the government being composed of individuals who use whatever power they have for their own reasons.
I think it started in March 2005 when we made the very, very serious mistake of trying to convince airline employees to behave like reasonable people. We were leaving NJ after my mother-in-law’s funeral and were in Newark Airport, trying to catch our plane to Chicago in order to get a connecting flight to St Louis. Unfortunately, the flight from Newark originated at Logan; it was delayed because of bad weather; and when it arrived we weren’t allowed to board because…the delayed flight MIGHT get us to Chicago too late to make our connecting flight. The ticket agent told us we would have to wait until the next day to fly into Chicago, but we wouldn’t be charged anything.
My husband asked the perfectly reasonable question: “Why can’t we fly to Chicago tonight, take our chances with catching the connecting flight and if we miss it, you can put us on the flight to St Louis THAT WE WOULD BE TAKING ANYWAY IF WE STAY IN NEWARK?”
They wouldn’t do this and my husband got very upset. Bear in mind that (1) it was late (2) it was cold (3) we had just turned in our rental car so finding a place to stay would be difficult (4) the ticket agents spoke very little English — and, of course, there was no supervisor available.
This was on top of the emotional stress he was feeling, having just BURIED HIS MOTHER.
Anyway, the ticket agents called security, all of a sudden we were surrounded by about 8 or 9 security guards who spent the rest of the night just kind of hanging around the AirTrans counter because we spent the rest of the night sleeping in Newark Airport.
The next flight to Chicago was at 5 a.m. we are in the line bright and early — and get pulled out of line for us and our luggage to be thoroughly searched. (Us and a couple of Pakistani businessmen … so I’m sure the process is completely random.) I guess the ticket agents, security people and TSA people work together to protect our nation’s airways from….middle-aged people with bad tempers.
This was only the beginning…on another flight to NJ from St Louis, I decided at the last minute to check my carry-on. I am a book editor and there was a manuscript in the bag that I was working on. It was on dengue and other hemorrhagic diseases. I’m sure you can guess what happened next — the TSA searched my bag and pegged me as a bioterrorist. (I don’t believe any of them actually understood what they were reading; just seeing certain ‘hot button’ words was probably enough.)
They held my bag for four days and went through it thoroughly. The manuscript was completely out of order and all my things were tossed around. By the time they saw fit to give it back I had left NJ and was back in Missouri. To be fair, they did make the effort to get it back to me — it followed me cross country (it went via Richmond, VA for some reason, while I went via Chicago) and I eventually got it back.
However, since then I have been a ‘person of interest’ every time I fly.
Remember when TSA was going to replace all those security folks at the airports? Well,they did…in large part, with the same folks already working at the airport. For the most part, there’s been no improvement in the quality of our security checks, because it’s the same people that were doing the work that allowed the 9/11 terrorists to get on board.
Instead of doing something that makes sense…providing training and funding to pay people to do a better job…TSA attempts to implement policies and procedures designed to catch security risks. The folks working security at airports are underpaid and overworked. It’s a tedious job, and they don’t get enough breaks to keep them fresh.
And as alluded to by Lucy, they are people, meaning some of them can and do abuse their position if you piss them off.
Bill, I would be surprised if you have never had your mind changed by someone else’s arguments, but I suppose it’s possible.
Prepare to be surprised. Bill Myers is one of the folks I would consider MOST likely to alter his views based on good arguments to the contrary. There are those who would consider such a thing to be threatening to their self esteem. Bill ain’t one of them.
Has everyone been following the news of suspicious incidents of people bringing weird crap on board? Cheese wrapped in wires with batteries stuffed in them, that sort of thing. Barring the possibility of new cheese technology of which I have been somehow remiss in hearing about, it sounds an awful lot like they are trying to see what kind of stuff they can smuggle on board.
As much as I like cheese, nothing beats a nice port wine after a long day, having my cheese assimilated doesn’t sound like it’d at to the enjoyment factor. This having been said, I have been known to both bring my own cheese places and request it as gifts. However, taking it traveling isn’t very often in my plans. Something about walking up to a counter, being it customs or otherwise, and saying, “Well, here’s my cheese” just doesn’t seem to fit the low profile aspect you’d think they’d go for. If anything, people wouldn’t want to do that to avoid the “Please don’t cut this on the plane” statements. Also, barring dairy farmers, Kraft executives and they who call Cheddar home most people don’t go around hauling chunks of cheese. Much to many rodents chagrin, I’d imagine. But then, there are also people who’ve tried lighting their shoes up in the processed atmosphere of a jetliner, so maybe they think, like Reese’s cup, throw two things together and no one’ll notice.
BTW, sorry for this, that first line should be babble babble, try to be witty, babble ADD to the enjoyment factor.
Also, having checked through some articles about the threat posed by either Roboswiss or Locutthecheese of Borg, they reported that the baggage checkers were issued a memo to watch for suspicious items that could be a bomb. Funny, I thought that’s what they were THERE for.
Bobb Alfred: Without any effort to be clever, yes, it was because he killed two other people because he overestimated his competence to fly that I think he was a jáçkášš. When you go out “in a blaze of glory” by yourself, some people find it romantic. When your arrogance kills two other people, you’re an incompetent moron. When one takes other people’s lives in one’s hands one should use due caution. Were the weather conditions that JFK Jr. faced foreseeable? Yes, they were. Was he qualified to fly in them? No, he was not. Did that make one bit of difference to him? I don’t know, but perhaps not, considering that he flew them into the Atlantic Ocean. I am quite suspicious of anyone who thinks he is so important that common sense is beneath him. Unfortunately, that is very common in his family.
“Visual Flight Rules” (VFR): I will stipulate that he met the minimum standards for flying in such conditions. Now I ask, what conditions did he fly under, and weren’t they completely foreseeable? Did Lauren Bessette deserve anything less than the average person because her sister’s husband’s father is immensely beloved for losing a big piece of his head? She is dead because her brother in law thought he knew how to fly.
Jeffrey–look, there seems to be little question that Kennedy made a reckless decision that cost him his life and that of his family. That said, what benefit is there in trashing the guy? He was not a malicious guy, he seemed decent enough for someone who grew up under a microscope.
Make fun of Teddy all you want; he’s earned it and more. Kicking JFK Jr just seems small, even if it can be argued that it is justified.
Did Lauren Bessette deserve anything less than the average person because her sister’s husband’s father is immensely beloved for losing a big piece of his head?
Good God man. Listen to yourself.