At least now he won’t need a night light any more.
Maybe she couldn’t afford health insuarance for the little one and was getting desperate. I wonder what the screener found was wrong with the baby? Next up, dressing your baby up like a cat and taking it to the vet for cheaper care.
…yeah, his testicles will now perform that function, if nothing else. :eek:
I know they say this non-English-speaking woman was an “inexperienced traveller,” but I honestly wonder what on earth she could have been thinking. I mean, how completely inexperienced do you have to be to not (a) know what the X-ray machine is or (b) at least ask “what the hell is this?” before you push your 1 month old grandbaby through it? I give high marks to the Airport for treating it as a learning moment – how can we improve screening procedures? – but I have to think in this case the only fix is to have smarter passengers and/or passengers who have the first clue how to travel by air. As the spokesperson said, “We’re trying to figure out what changes we can make, short of putting up signs saying ‘Don’t put your baby through the X-ray machine.’”
On the flip side of this, some nutcase, somewhere, is reading the story in the OP and wondering how to hide a retrievable weapon in a baby, knowing that it won’t be X-rayed.
No good if she can’t read english. How about, "No pasar a tu bebé a través de la máquina de radiografía! "
I love that LAX security is run by Mr. Haney. “Don’ worry, Mister Douglas, Ah got the gen-you-wine Haney’s Patented Baby X-Rayer raght here. Only forty-five dollars to put the little tyke in, and another forty-five t’ git him out agin.”
Fortunately, this s a very rare incident, and the level of radiation is unlikely to have hurt the baby. However, the apologists for the TSA talk as if every passenger should be fluent in English, should know that the machine is an X-ray machine which might be danmgerous, and should review the TSA’s instructions on its website:
The TSA should use some common sense. Some passengers understand little English, don’t understand the technology being used, and don’t go to the TSA’s website to review instructions. (In fact, I suspect that less than 5% of passengers go to the TSA website.)
Give me a break, Giles. If you’re too much of an asstard to know what an X-ray machine is, then you can walk.
Asstards travel all the time. And they reproduce. Possibly more importantly, harried otherwise intellegent and reasonable parents travel all the time. Watch the security lines in Orlando sometime. Some pair of parents is handling a sleeping baby, twin toddlers and a five year old - one of the children in full meltdown mode over the lines and scary machines - exhausted from a week of riding “Its A Small World” fourteen times in a row and perfectly capable of absent-mindedly letting baby go on ride on the conveyor belt in an effort to keep their toddler from running away while simultanously removing their shoes and belts and trying not to misplace their boarding passes while the person in line behind them makes snide remarks about “kids holding up the line.” In some ways its amazing that a baby doesn’t go through the x-ray machine every day there. (Traveling sucks, traveling with small kids is a fate I wouldn’t wish on anyone).
Fortunately, the radition dose seems to be so low that if you are worried about it, you probably should take your infant on the plane to start with. I’d guess the risk of injury coming out the other side and down the ramp is bigger than the risk from radiation. To me, this looks like a non-problem - but we get to make fun of the grandmother PLUS the TSA
Right, so every passenger has to know (1) that those machines are X-ray machines, and (2) that they are dangerous inside, but not to the operator who spends every day sitting just behind it? Note that not all the stuff they use for screening uses X-rays, and there’s a certain amount of secrecy in the details of their proicedures. (You aren’t allowed to use cameras in these screening areas, presumably so the terroriats wn’t be abler to find loopholes in the system).
Part of the problem is the TSA staff is over-familiar withthe procedures: they get tired of explaining the same thing over and over to people new to the system. Because they’ve said it and heard it 10,000 times, they get impatient with people who haven’t heard it once (and who are nervous and confused and don’t understand much English).
And part of the problem is that the work is boring, so they aren’t paying attention. They should be watching every passenger for unusual behaviour, but obviously in this case, they weren’t.
There’s got to be some kind of mathmetical-statistical scientific model that proves that eventually every joke in the movie “Airplane” will happen in real life.
I’m remembering the x-ray shot that showed a gun, a chest x-ray and other silly things.
The babies they’ve been putting aboard the planes I’ve recently been traveling on would have a poor chance of being retrieved from an x-ray machine if the fee were 45 cents, let alone $45.
That’s what the metal detectors are for…
Are you nuts!? 
To hell with whether or not you know it’s an X-ray machine; what kind of sane human just plops a baby onto a conveyor belt to be whisked inside a dark machine? Jesus Christ.
There’s got to be one of those internationally-incomprehenisble signs for this, hasn’t there? They have one for just about everything else.
There has to be some minimum level of competence and human responsibility that we can presume as we make our way through the modern world. “Not everyone would know these are X-ray machines, and they’re dangerous inside?” Shit fire, not everyone knows that the little man/the flashing red hand at an intersection tells a pedestrian when not to walk so they’re not hit by a truck, but yet we don’t post officials at every intersection to go, “You’re not walking now, are you? Don’t walk now!” The modern world is full of machines; some of them are dangerous. (“That’s a Zamboni! Stay off the ice, Senora!*”) If you do not have the minimum competence to not put a baby into a bin, and then slide him into the black maw of an unknown machine, then you need to fly with a chaperone. Whether the issue is a complete lack of modern awareness or plain old stupidity – and, to be fair, it sounds like it was the former, not the latter – it is not the best use of the TSA’s time and taxpayers’ money to post people in order to affirmatively prevent what 99.99% of the traveling public knows better than to do in the first place. Call it an unfortunate accident, but the fault lies with the traveler, not the TSA or LAX.
- Yes, I know Senora takes a tilde. I don’t know how to do one.
How about knowing that you shouldn’t put you baby inside a machine you don’t know what it does. Do they have to put “No babies” signs on blenders, high-voltage transformers and jet engines?
I just hope the baby doesn’t develop any bone disease in the near future and they sue the poor TSA guy for not diagnosing it correctly.
I can see how an inexperienced traveler may think that a baby would be required to go through the machine. The inexperienced traveling adult has to go through a “machine” when she walks through the metal detector so maybe she thought the baby also had to go through a machine. There’s no reason for the inexperienced traveling adult to think the baby would be harmed … she could see purses and laptops going in the bin, slid through the machine, and coming out unscathed on the other side.
I’m not defending her behavior, but I can see where it could have been an innocent mistake.