[QUOTE=Ensign Edison]
No, he was claiming that they were the kind of tough guy psychos with inflated egos who take themselves too seriously to be yukking it up. And I agree he was wrong, but I think his point was misunderstood (and perhaps not well expressed).
[/QUOTE]
well, no. from that other thread: (emphasis mine) (cut and pasted his entire posts, misspellings are his)
Post #46 **It is unbelievable that the TSA agents would have been snickering at her while she was removing the piercings. I can not believe that to be true. **However, I don’t take this to be evidence that she’s lying, because **I can easily imagine she heard them snickering about something else entirely and misinterpreted it as them snickering at her situation. ** (clarification by wring: (he later backed away from the “unbelievable” but here he clearly talks about them NOT snickering at her, but possibly at something else.[/clarification, back to direct quotes of his w/emphasis by me)
Post 56 It’s just… not like that.
(My wife was a TSA for a couple of years recently, BTW.)
That’s just not the attitude they display towards things.
I mean, as someone said, there could be a “couple of idiots” hired by the TSA, but openly snickering at someone while they’re removing their piercings is just completely counter to the TSA culture. It’s really suprising if even a “couple of idiots” could get away with it.
Post 57: It’s believable that an idiot would think this was what TSA’s rules required him to do. It’s hardly believable that he’d be snickering about it, esp. w/in hearing of the person.
Post 63 But my point isn’t that there are “rules” against snickering at passengers. My point is that it’s just not what it’s like. It’s just not what’s done.
I don’t know. I don’t know how to put it any better than that, sorry.
Post 64 Yeahbut, that’s a “most people” the vast majority of which have no basis for claiming to know whether TSAs would generally behave this way. I, on the other hand, do have some basis for making a claim like that. Sure, I’ve seen plenty of sort of angrily rude TSAs. Even amongst my wife’s peers. (And it was partly because of the stress induced by the constant effort of not slipping into this attitude that my wife finally quit.) I’m pretty sure it will basically bear out. I think some stupid newbie did the wrong thing, I think the lady was correctly upset about this, and I think she heard people laughing and felt like they were laughing at her. But I can’t imagine any TSA was actually laughing at her. I know I sound very “faithful” so to speak, but it’s just, I know these people.
(The TSA agents, by the way, generally hate these stupid rules as much as we do. That’s another reason it’s so hard for me to believe any group of them would laugh at a lady in such a position.)
Post 91 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.
Pst 98 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.
Pst 99 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.
Post 112 Does anyone other than that woman corroborate the laughing detail? (Because, well, yeah, I do find it kind of unbelievable.)
To be clear, my claim has not been that TSAs are particularly good people or driven by professionalism. Rather, my claim is that in the TSA working environment, stuff like what this lady had to do just isn’t the kind of thing that is funny.
Post 131 I’ve also argued that human nature in general (forgetting the question of TSAs specifically) is such that it is much more likely that the lady was mistaken than that people were laughing at her. Knowing what its like being in customer service in general, and knowing that it is human nature in general to avoid trouble and bide one’s time until one can go on break, I am led to believe that it is, in general, more likely that people are mistaken about being laughed at in situations like this at than that they were actually laughed at. That’s just a general fact about situations like this, abstracted from the TSA angle. It’s not impossible, it’s just much morelikely that someone who reports something like this has made a mistake. And given what I know about what it’s like to be a TSA, it’s all the more likely (again, this is not the language of “impossibility”) in this situation that the woman is mistaken.
And frankly that’s more of that thread than I want to re-live, thanks just the same. I still say it’s more than ironic that the same poster who strongly held to the belief that the TSA agents wouldn’t be laughing inappropriately at a passenger (for whatever reason, including ‘their culture’, ‘their professionalism/training’ and/or ‘their fear of getting fired’), should at the same time express concern that these same TSA agents might act inappropriately (and even illegally) in some other aspect of their job.
