I wonder if anyone here knows whether this issue has been considered or addressed by those in charge of searching luggage at the airports:
Employees wear gloves and handle underwear and whatever else they find within a suitcase. They do not change gloves between suitcases. That means that the filth from some stranger’s dirty underwear, or whatever, is being smeared onto my things.
I’ve tried placing my under-lovelies in transparent ziplock bags, but they still open up the bag and rifle through them anyway.
I realize that they wear gloves for their protection, not ours, but I can’t believe that this is a standard practice when it is so clearly an unsanitary intrusion.
There’s a Bullshit episode by Penn & Teller which attempts to quantify the amount of biological contaminants that adhere to people’s hands and asses after using public lavatories. The conclusion was that your ass is much cleaner after taking a shit than your hands were before you even entered the restroom. There was a very low amount of matter transferred to your hand from your ass. I don’t see why that would be different for a simply panty inspection by the TSA.
What proportion of your fellow passengers do you suspect of packing feces in their luggage? I can’t imagine that there would be a significant amount of biological matter on packed underwear and I would be surprised if it were easily transferred by glove from one suitcase to another.
Given what are often the conditions of the crapper here at the office, all of 'em. How much will U.S. Customs let you import before having to delcare it, anyway?
I’ve done laundry for enough males to know that I don’t care to handle their underwear unless I have to. Personally, I’d rather they didn’t handle someone’s sex toys and then my things either. I don’t want someone else’s anything on my things unless I invite them.
Aside from just being argumentative, doesn’t this bother anyone but me?
Do you ever shake hands with anyone? How do you know they wash their hands? What if they washed their hands but the guy they just shook hands with didn’t? What if that dollar bill you just got as change was in a wallet that accidently fell in a toilet? And was dried off and then used to buy a burger? By a guy who doesn’t wash his hands?
You know, at some point, you either have to let it go or go live in a bubble with Howard Hughes.
This kind of stuff never even enters my mind. I am sure there are far more germs transferred from the airplane seat, the tray table, and the airline magazine than there are from the TSA inspectors, not to mention if you use the airplane toilet.
I think this qualifies as a phobia rather than a legitimate, rational concern.
Someone was passing around an article in the office that the most germ-laden objects in an office are keyboards and telephones. So, yeah, I’d go with the tray tables, armrests, onboard radio volume knobs, light switches, fan knob, door latches, and other hand-operated items as being far more dirty than the items in someone’s suitcase.
They say the majority of $100 bills in major cities carry traces of cocain, mostly from being in cash drawers at banks where they run into those used to snort the stuff.
Agreed. This is just an example of focusing on something that seems icky to some while ignoring its trivial nature in the overall scheme of things. It does sound like bubble talk.
I don’t know that, but even smelly underwear contains very little actual “contamination”, and I doubt customs people roughly rummage through actual soiled underwear without dumping their gloves afterwards, if at all.
So assuming normal dirty underwear there is very little that adheres to the gloves. I’m sure you could find some bacteria there, but not a whole lot more than you find anywhere humans touch, airplane seat arm rests for instance… or airplane toilets. Then they pick briefly through your undergarments to make sure there’s nothing underneath. They don’t pick one item up and rub it vigourously to get as much contamination in one spot as possible, they just quickly search through your suitcase. I doubt the amount of contamination from that exceeds that from you taking said items out after touching door handles and such, unless you wash your hands before unpacking.
Feel free to prove me wrong with some experiments though, I’m only theorizing.
Thanks for all the comments. And the unsolicited psychiatric diagnoses. :dubious:
I guess what bothers me most about the searching procedure is the lack of courtesy. It’s justs now dawning upon me that an entire generation is growing up accustomed to and even relaxed about various intrusions upon privacy, both physical and electronic: from body searches at concerts, to government eavesdropping, to airport searches, to internet spyware, overpopulation, traffic, and advanced medical technology. While some of these “intrusions” are welcome in an effort to be healthier, I wonder whether the threshold for indignation at intrusion of privacy has been lowered overall in the general population. IMHO, taken to its extreme, this could make us ripe for dictatorship or theocracy.
It’s horrible enough that some stranger is pawing through our things, but if he/she must do so, then the lack of a courteous glove-changing is just a further insult. While I recognize the delay that would cause, there might be some other way to ensure minimum intrusiveness.
Perhaps this is evolving into an IMHO discussion of our gradual tolerance of privacy intrusions. The Numbing-Down of America.
I can get behind the general sentiment against government intrusion into our privacy, but in my view, the sanitary argument just trivializes it and phrases like “the lack of a courteous glove-changing” not only trivializes the argument but also marginalizes it, like the old guy at the city commission meeting who goes on and on about “courtesy” and then adds how courteous the space aliens were when they anally probed him. Maybe he had a point that the cops should have to pay him for unjustifiably shooting his dog when they mistakenly executed a drug raid on his house, but the valid point is harmed by the extraneous stuff about sanitation and courtesy.
Such extraneous stuff is how human minds work. I repeatedly found myself pissed-off by the unsanitary issue, and only through discussing it here, realized that it had more to do with the larger issue. The evolution of thought or ideas is what discussion is about, right? I certainly didn’t set out to trivialize a larger issue.
