Depends on the proof of what you’re drinking. 
Just as an FYI, you ARE allowed to carry an empty water bottle through security. I tried it out last time I flew, and it worked like a charm at several different airports. Then you fill it from the drinking fountain on the other side. Works like a charm, and it’s a small but surprisingly satisfying way to stick it to the Man.
Chiiilllld, please, I’m almost ashamed to tell you.
…
Okay, it’s McWilliams 2005 Shiraz (Alc. = 13.5%). In my defense, though, that was preceded by some cranberry vodka. (Yeah, it’s a lazy, HAZY Sunday over here in Northern New Jersey!)
Oh, and I’m eating sashimi (with the wine, not the voda–I’m not a complete Philistine), so I’m blaming that, too.
Signed,
Li’l Pluck, who, believe it or not, can indeed drink damn near an entire fleet under the table (before doing all sorts of naughty things to them). 
Thanks, Mama Tiger, and you are correct. And, normally (outside of airport environments), I tend to be aware that I can refill at water fountains.
When I’m flying, though, I guess I just go into this mode (before I go into the airport) where I’m like, “Alright, Li’l Pluck, let’s just put all the ‘contraband’ away (in quart-sized plastic bags in my backpack or tucked into my checked baggage) so as to not draw ANY unnecessary attention to your Black, muthafuckin’ self” that I don’t even think of that. I’ll try to keep it in mind when I fly to ATL next month, though.
I had something suss looking in my bag before a flight and got waved to a desk where a bunch of people were waiting to have their bags checked. The security guy was about to start going through my bag when I said, in a perfectly friendly and calm way “actually she’s next”, gesturing to the woman ahead of me. Like you would if you’ve got any manners and know it’s not your turn. She said something similar. The guy said: “If you are going to give me attitude, you can both just wait”, took my bag and hers back off the counter, and put them aside. I could tell the guy was a complete petty power jerk, so I just waited and he did mine and hers about ten minutes later.
His big mistake: made me miss my plane. Gave me plenty of time to complain to his supervisor. She said if what I was saying was right, he was going to lose his job. Mine wasn’t the first complaint, and they recorded everything so he couldn’t deny it. Hope you starve, cocksucker.
The thing is, CannyDan, that’s the exact same reasoning about how the security measures at Kennedy Space Center have successfully protected the Shuttle from elephant stampedes: “There haven’t been any, so it must work!” :rolleyes: (directed at the logical fallacy)
Undercarriage bomb is better than a 4 foot long Igloo cooler holding Stinger missiles or RPGs? Shouldn’t they at least look in the damn cooler? They have not done so yet, on repeated trips. But they *have * quizzed me about carrying firearms, and warned me that there is no hunting in the wildlife preserve!!
A bomb, no matter how craftily secreted to the undercarriage, could have succeeded in destroying only a chunk of swamp and a few gators. There is no way to closely approach any actual target from the Causeway to the Seashore. Even blowing a huge hole in the causeway itself has exactly zero security ramifications since it serves only the beaches, not the launch infrastructure.
And these guys aren’t looking closely enough to remark upon anything less suspicious than that blinking red digital counter. It’s done as a pro forma, not as any kind of real attempt at security. Just like the barriers along the roadside.
As for that crafty application of goo (or the lack of same as a trigger for suspicion)— well, there’s a miles-long “wildlife drive” that consists of a dirt road through the swamps. Potholes and puddles along the way pretty well ensure that not just the undercarriage but much of the vehicle is liberally plastered with a hefty coating of Florida’s finest mud. We sport just such an encrustation every time we pass through this security point. The crud is thick enough to actually *become * a series of unidentifiable masses on the underside. I’m still waiting for any inspector to actually poke these with a stick to reveal the blinking counter.
Yep.
Oh, they also closed the three beach access areas (parking lot, boardwalk over the dunes) closest to the shuttle, when they barricaded the roadside pulloffs. And, guess what? No shuttle has been attacked by any groups of half naked sun burned children wielding pails and shovels, either. Yet another 100% success story for the security planners!! Hooray!
I feel oh so safe now…
It’s small consolation, but it’s fun to see one of these apes get inconvenienced themselves. At Providence airport, they have the policy of opening every single checked bag. One suspicious box was marked “Live lobsters.” The security lady opened it up, and lo and behold, it did not contain lobsters. It contained crabs. About a dozen of them. SO she dutifully pulled them out, one at a time, and put them on the counter. The look on her face was priceless, as if she were sorting through turds. And of course, all of the crabs were walking away from her, and she had to chase after them.
We’ve flown twice in our 19 years together; once pre-9/11 and once post-9/11. We got special treatment coming home from DC (and silly me…I thought going INTO DC was going to be a problem). I never found out why we were chosen. I can only assume it’s because my husband looks like a holdover from a 1968 Vietnam war protest.
I’ve just remembered one time they got rather abrupt with me, to say the least, at the x-ray. I was travelling with my violin, normally just about the most straightforward thing to identify on the screen. This time however, I was taken to one side and given the whole ‘is this your case?..what is inside?..any sharp items whatsoever?..’ treatment. (This was December 2001, too.) It took several minutes of questions, and of searching the violin case, before they found this practice mute tucked inside a pocket.
At that point, they admitted that they thought I’d got a razor blade hidden in the case. I can kind of see their point, and certainly don’t carry that in the case when I fly now.
I fly frequently and I am a smoker. Lighters are prohibited in carry on baggage so I simply put one in my pocket. The only annoying part is all the smokers at arrivals need to borrow MY lighter because they threw their’s out. Although I must say one screener in Denver * did asked * me if I had a lighter in my pocket. Now there’s some tough and thorough security.
We did a lot of travelling after 9/11 and without fail, I was “randomly selected” at the gate for additional inspection. Needless to say, since we were often in business class, and thus boarding before everyone else, it might’ve felt random at first, but soon it became perfectly clear what was going on since (a) nobody else ever got “randomly selected” after me and (b) everyone else looked either white or black, but not middle eastern.
This happened constantly and would piss my (lily white) wife off no end. US passport, South American birthplace, and as non-Arabic a sounding name as is possible, and I would still get profiled religiously.
It’s been a few years since this last happened, but it’s also been the same amount of time since we traveled internationally, so I can’t say if one has any relationship to the other or not.
My first time flying alone last year (and the 2nd time I’ve flown in my life) where I got stopped AND my baggage gone thu was on my way back from Colorado Springs to Charleston, WV. I guess what got me pulled was that I had on a brightly tye dyed shirt and looked like I hadn’t slept in days (waking up early and I don’t go well together). I think what got my suitcase pulled might have been the BRIGHT SCREAMING PINK SMILY FACE luggage tag and small skein of brightly colored ribbons I put on the handle to be able to ID my suitcase.
I’m flying to Canada next month and hooboy, am I hoping not to get searched again.
Nah, not when you’ve identified at least one job that suits his qualifications.
You want some Special Attention? Buy a one-way ticket.
A while back, SWMBO drove over to New Orleans to visit kinfolk. I couldn’t get off work, so I flew over Friday night, planning to drive back with her Sunday afternoon. Needless to say, one-way tickets get flagged and I got everything short of a prostate exam.
Airport security is a farce. They need to totally do away with it. If they want true security on the flight, they should just hand out Bowie knives to the boarding passengers and collect them after landing.
Yep, because nobody is better at convincing security they’re a non-threatening innocent than a non-threatening innocent that doesn’t know there’s a bomb strapped to the car.
So, your theory is that a terrorist hit squad chartered a tour and secretly swapped out the sandwiches with stinger missiles… and everyone totally kept their cool during the undercarriage inspection and stayed in their role as geriatric bird watchers? Of course that’s silly. There’s no good reason to look in the cooler. It’s a waste of time. Act squirrelly and overly-cooperative next time, see if they search the car.
Y’don’t think a busload of grandmas going boom would delay a launch?
Probably. Nobody is going to utter the phrase “acceptable risk” any time soon, so a lot of pointless measures get mandated and half-heartedly executed (or over-enthusiastically executed, depending on the temperament of the people in question). It just seemed like you were linking the undercarriage check to suspicion of the vehicle occupants, and that isn’t usually the case.
Procedures that seem capricious and ineffective from the point-of-view of a single individual being searched may be serving some non-obvious purpose that makes more sense across the entire security program. Or it could just be some power-tripping asshat. Leave some feedback with a supervisor if you feel it’s important enough that security was too lax or unnecessarily intrusive.
And yet you can see by many comments here, many people apparently resent the kids and old women being chosen. They must find it preferable (and acceptable) to have you and your swarthy skin profiled time after time. I don’t think this is fair to you or any of the many law-abiding, non-terrorist people in this country who share your complexion or bear middle-eastern-sounding names. But a lot of people apparently think it’s much more “sensible” for you guys to be profiled time after time while anyone who “looks innocent” isn’t looked at twice.
The reality is, if we have a truly random system, the sometimes the system is going to pick candidates that look ridiculous. We can’t have it both ways.
If you want to become predictable and always excuse the old women or people who have convincing-looking letters from their doctors, then I know what I’d do if I was some crazy loon who wanted to smuggle something abroad a plane. I’d find a old woman or forge a letter from a doctor to get the job done. Predictable is vulnerable.
But I digress. As for my feelings, I think much of the security screening is probably bullshit. I don’t believe the inconvenience vs. security-added is anywhere near in sync. Do they know if their screening techniques are effective? Probably not. The liquid ban, the little baggies–I’ve read little to suggest that this is anything but ridiculous.
However, that said, until they come to their senses we ALL have to go through it. I have little patience for the person who wants to delay everyone else while he complains, gives the TSA employee a hard time, sighs loudly, complies slowly, etc. We all have somewhere to go. The person standing behind you may be on a long-planned vacation, on an important business trip, or travelling to the funeral of a loved one. Fucking suck it up and do what is asked of you and stop pretending that your day, your travel plans, your shoes, your precious baggage is so much more goddamned important than that of everyone else.
If you don’t like TSA policies or the way they’re being carried out, then find an effective way to complain about it, one that doesn’t make things worse for everyone else in line. Write to your congressman, bitch to the White House, call the airport authority, let the airline know. Do it later, on your own time. But while you’re in the airport, fucking SAC UP and keep the line moving.
Here’s the most :rolleyes: -worthy thing of all…
Heh, I used to be a TSA security screener. I hated that job. But trust me when I say, the passenger screeners may not be thorough, but your luggage downstairs is being very thoroughly screened. They were very strict with us. We also had to calibrate and clean the “little swipy machines” which are ionizers at the end of each shift.
To give you an example of how accurate those machines are, they told us that if these machines detected golf balls instead of explosives and you had one purple golf ball and hid it in RFK stadium in DC and filled the whole stadium up with white goldballs, that machine would easily find that purple golf ball. That’s what it does with explosive particles. Because explosive particles are sticky and stick to everything you touch. People in the armed forces always set off the alarms, because explosives are all over the base. Every bag that gets alarmed in the “XRay machine” gets swabbed.