[QUOTE=wring]
your wife’s experiences are her own, if you then attempt to universalize them, you get into trouble.
Her experiences come from her location. In my earthquake example - apparently I did not make it clear enough for you. Your wife, in your location, feels no earthquake. A stranger in another location feels one. If you take wife’s word over the other person’s your an idiot. Hell, even if they’re in the same location - her experiences are not universal (there was an earthquake -very mild- in my area once, I felt it since I was leaning against a wall at the time, others did not feel it).
as for the number ‘thousands’ I’m confident that there are at least that number, but will admit that I didn’t reasearch it. Going on the basic number of interactions on a daily basis, I"d be surprised if there weren’t thousands of incidents. I’ve only flown maybe 4 times in the past 5 years, and on one of those trips came across a needlessly nasty, rude fuck as a TSA. so my experience tells me that 1/4 ofthe time you’ll come against an asshole.
But I won’t try and extrapolate my personal experience to make a universal prediction.
[/QUOTE]
Thanks for the clarification, but the analogy is still not a good one, mostly for the same reasons. It completely fails to capture the structure of my argument.
I am not generalizing from one person’s experience. Rather, I have adduced considerations having to do with human nature, the trouble-avoiding, just-make–it-to-the-next-break nature of people’s behavior in “customer service” type positions in general (i.e. without reference to my wife or the TSA), as well as long familiarity with the experiences of those TSAs (including my wife) that I do know.
In the earthquake case, there is no reason to think my wife’s earthquake judgments here would have anything to do with the question whether an earthquake happened somewhere else. But this is not quite true in the TSA case. There are plenty of reason to think my wife’s (and her coworkers’) experiences are typical. Some generalization is licensed. But let me reiterate (as I did in the above paragraph, and as I have done several times already in this thread) that such a generalization is not the basic structure of my argument. (Though it is part of it.)
And I’ll repeat something else. I am not claiming TSAs are generally nice and polite. (It happens to be the case that I do think TSAs are generally polite when on the job, but that’s not related to the claim I’ve been arguing for here.) Rather, my claim is that the kind of thing related in the OP isn’t the kind of thing that is funny in their work environment. Here is what I mean by that. My wife and I happened to have lunch with a couple of TSAs today. We were talking about this thread. Stories about rude TSAs, being short or smartalec with passengers, brought reactions along the lines of “That’s bad behavior for a TSA. Stress will do that to you.” But the idea of the TSAs laughing at this lady instead brought a reaction more akin to “That’s… weird.” (These) TSAs easily recognize the temptation to be rude. But the idea of laughing at the situation described in the OP didn’t strike them as bad TSA behavior, it struck them, rather, as nonsense. Like saying someone laughed at a cheesecake. Its like a category error. My claim is that this reflects the typical attitude.
And let me repeat something else. Though I started the thread using the language of inconcievability, I have long since acknowledged this is an exaggeration. I’m sure some pair of TSAs somewhere are happy to by psychopaths together. This brings out another point about the structure of my argument that people are missing. I am claiming it is much more likely that the woman is mistaken than that TSAs were laughing at her. Again, I make this claim based on what is generally known about alot of things, not just based on what I know about TSAs. Generally, people don’t laugh about this kind of thing. Generally, people in this kind of position feel vulnerable. Generally, people in jobs that involve a lot of interactio with customers try their best to keep on a poker face and just last through to their next break without incident. It is very common for people who are accusing someone of something to want to see that someone, and to want that someone to be seen, in as bad a light as possible. Put these general facts together, and it becomes very plausible to say the following: The majority of reports of customer service types openly laughing at customers are probably false reports, whether because of a misunderstanding or whatever. There are probably some true reports as well, but the majority of reports are probably false. Therefore any report would require corroboration.
Then I add in what I know about TSAs, and the likelihood goes down even further.
I feel like I had one more point to make.
-FrL-
