As a sort-of-Arabic-looking person, I have no intent of doing anything other than meekly complying with whatever crazy shit the TSA tells me to do.
While I’ve always wanted my name to become synonymous with a Supreme Court precedent, the problem here is that I’d end up in a War on Terror gulag with no hope of getting my hearing in front of a military tribunal publicized, much less have my day in court.
Not to mention they’d confiscate my duty-free stuff.
She would probably have been detained for several hours, at best. You have no idea how pissed off these idiots get if you question them or ask for a supervisor. You’d probably get arrested.
Sorry Frylock, but I guess the best indicator of your wife’s intelligence and character is that she left.
Please allow me to stand up and yell “Hell YEAH!” here. And no, I don’t know what option there is other than going along - you guys opened these doors, you happily voted for them or the people who created them, and now you’re stuck with them. Sucks to be you.
I really hate that comment. I didn’t vote for any of these idiots and I most certainly did not vote for the Idiot in Chief.
We did?
-FrL-
A “bra bomb?” How fucking pathetic. This country is beyond stupid.
:rolleyes:
I sure as fuck did not.
As for what I personally am doing about it, well, I’m basically not flying. There have been a few times in the last couple of years that I could have flown somewhere, but chose to drive instead, mostly because I didn’t want to submit myself to the police state-like atmosphere in airports today. And I used to love flying, too. :mad:
I voted for their opponents.
As a Canadian, I sure as hell didn’t, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have to put up with the results 
The security line is certainly not the place to protest.
But I’ve notified my congressman and both my senators that I feel that our current airport security system is arrant nonsense, and that I believe it discourages the casual flyer, which will cause revenue loss for the airlines.
If more folks did this, and told their reps the horror stories they’ve experienced, it might make a difference.
Ok I know what I sound like.
I’ll just post two more relevant comments.
I mentioned the snickering story to my wife yesterday. Her response was, first, to roll her eyes. Next she sighed, and said “Nobody’s talking about you” or something to that effect. She then went on to tell me that it was very, very common for them to be accused of things like this, when there was no basis for these accusations. She said people are really paranoid about this stuff. And she reiterated the fact that when they had to have people do things like remove piercings, laughing was the last thing on anyone’s mind. I asked her if it could just be that her and her friends amongst the TSAs were the “good ones” so to speak, and she seemed to think this was a very strange suggestion. In the end, she was reduced, as I have been, to inarticulately stammering phrases like “It’s just… it’s just not what it’s like. We don’t think of it that way.” Etc. So take that for whatever you think its worth.
Second comment: I worked in fast food as a kid, with a bunch of other kids. Customer’s sometimes accused us of things like laughing at them from the kitchen, etc. We never did that though. (Maybe, sometimes, after we thought they were gone, in the breakroom.) And we were a bunch of stupid kids who didn’t give a shit about these guys. We just knew it wasn’t worth the grief.
That was in a fast food place.
-FrL-
And the latter can be caused by nipples, so it all makes sense niow.
Can you accept that the TSA culture may be different where your wife worked than where this incident took place? Because I work for an agency when each office has its own culture and we are frequently surprised by the things we do in our office that staff in other offices can not do and vice versa.
Where your wife worked, they may have taken their duties very seriously. Apparently that is not the case amongst these particular TSA employees.
Maybe so. It strikes me as rather monolithic, being a federal agency and all, but who knows.
-FrL-
So there were some assholes among your wife’s peers and there was a lot of stress and pressure pushing people to end up like that. And yet you’re still trying to defend all TSA screeners and say they’d never even conceive of laughing at someone? Does not compute.
You’re saying that this sort of thing could never happen because of the TSA “culture”? Because everyone hired by the TSA is exactly the same kind of person and all act exactly the same way, and walk around beaming with pride that they’re part of such a glorious and noble profession? They’re people. With jobs. Some will do them well, some will suck. Some will be wonderful people, some will be jackasses on power trips. Why? Because they’re people. You’ll find nice people and you’ll find dickheads, in every single job in the whole wide world. No cites, but come on.
Wish I could do as much. Unfortunately my only son lives in Fla and taking a boat from the Dom Rep is not much of an option. So it turns out I have the pleasure of going through the “police-like atmosphere*” of your airports (be it Mia International or Ft. Lauderdale) a minimum of 4 to 5 times a year. And I fucking HATE it – not just because of how degrading it is on a personal basis but what I’ve seen done to other people. Never mind that some TSA bitch though it was a good idea to tear off the soles of a brand new pair of Nikes I was wearing because the “air puff” machine/box had detected “traces of explosives in them,” or them going through my laptop as if it was an UFO, nor that I can’t recall the last time I was let out through the ‘normal line’ instead of the gonad-massaging one – hey I have more than a fair command of the English language (which appears to bewilder them more, seeing my Spanish passport) and I can – and have – given some of them more that a fair bit of a piece of my mind. Guess I got lucky for I never suffered any additional punishment for doing so – and in all fairness, I even got a couple of apologies, But it really, really irks me to watch some clearly confused foreigner/tourist being barked at when it is obvious to see they have no clue what they are being told to do.
In fact I just got back from Orlando two weeks ago and while waiting in my now usual “terrarist” line (long and slow as hell, with only two agents tending to it), I befriended a Dutch fellow who was mad as hell – he told me that the only reason he comes to the US is business and that if it wasn’t for that he wouldn’t lay a foot in a US airport. Like me, he appears to be tagged for the “special” line but worse. Once, not long ago, while flying in from Germany, he was held for over six hours in an interrogation room where they tried to get him to confess that he was in the US for “agitative purposes” (whatever the fuck that means. He didn’t understand it either).
End result, they let him go after those six agonizing hours, as they couldn’t get him to confess to what he was obviously not about to do. Thing is, there’s really NOTHING you can do in the aftermath, as in the visa-waivers you sign (for countries that have treaties with the US – such as most/all of the EU) prior to entering the US it clearly says you renounce all of your national rights and defer to the Laws Of The Land.
Which means that I’ll keep getting my balls rubbed and my sneakers destroyed. And I should count myself lucky.
Ironically enough, once all that hell is done and over with, I actually LOVE being in the US. After all, it IS very much like a second home to me. Just so fucking sad to see how authority has gone wild and freedom has taken a back seat. Aaaah…how I long for the seventies! And not just because I had lots of hair back then.
*Great descriptor. I think US airports today must bear more than a passing resemblance to those in the days of the Iron Curtain.
If someone can make a shoe bomb, surely thay can make boob greandes, with a couple of these right below the skin.
No, I can imagine them being rude, short, going nuts and yelling, being smart-alec, those sort of things. What I can’t see is laughing.
In other words, I can imagine anger at passengers, but not levity towards their situation. The former matches the kinds of feelings I sometimes saw expressed after work. The latter does not.
-FrL-
You know, it occurs to me this doesn’t just have to be a war of intuitions.
Do you think it’s possible, esp. in a crowded area, for someone to hear laughing and think it’s directed at them when it’s not?
Which is more likely, objectively speaking? That a couple of TSAs were laughing at this lady within her hearing, or rather, that she heard laughing, and thought it was TSAs laughing at her.
Which do you expect happens more times per day? Isn’t the mistaken attribution likely to be far more common? And if that’s the case, shouldn’t we assume the lady was probably mistaken in this case?
So I’ve been using phraseology suggesting it’s somehow “inconcievable” that TSAs would be laughing at her. I know that’s probably too strong. But what I’m trying to get across just how incredibly unlikely this is.
Without knowing anything about what it’s like to be a TSA, I think it’s already safe to judge that it’s more likely that the lady was mistaken than that the people were laughing at her. My own experience, and the reported experience of others, attests to the fact that this kind of thing is relatively common.
Then add in what I do know about what it’s like to be a TSA, and it just becomes that much more likely that the lady was mistaken. Not only is it very plausible to think someone in that situation would hear laughing and mistakenly think its directed toward her, and not only is it very plausible that people who are just tired and trying to do their jobs would in general find little to laugh at here, and would generally be more interested in avoiding grief (and so would avoid laughing), also what I know about TSAs reinforces the likelihoods involved here.
I suddenly have to go so I’m sorry the above was not quite well put. Hopefully the idea of the argument comes through, though.
-FrL-
Are TSAs are far more professional and unlikely to publicly laugh at people’s private matters than Delta Airlines employees?
ETA: At the very least they are not all opposed to theft. Does that make them all bad people or sexual harassers? No, but it disproves the idea that 100% of them are being 100% professional.
