I’ve got a lot of catching up to do here (and, accordingly, will probably have a lot of posts here over the next few days), but I thought I’d start off with this one.

Last weekend, for reasons I’ll be covering here soon, my wife were taken on a 3-day tour of sections of Arizona, Nevada, and California. My airport of choice is Burbank’s Bob Hope Airport. The airport is near both my house and my office, meaning I can avoid the commute to and fro LAX, and also the endless security line and confusion endemic to LAX. On this particular visit to Bob Hope Airport was different, though, as I was gifted with an older Asian version of Barney Fife who took his job Very Seriously. He double- or triple-scanned the contents of the luggage of seemingly everyone on this junket, pulling things out and running them through again, including my wife’s. In non-clothes items, I had packed precisely what I pack on every trip, that being every trip made through this airport, that being probably four dozen times over the past two years. Sure enough, he grabbed a hold of my suitcase and told me he needed to personally inspect the contents.

Me:  “I’ve fly through this airport all the time with exactly the same contents, no problem.”

Him:  “I say it’s like traffic ticket. You don’t get traffic ticket every time. This time, it like you get traffic ticket.”

Me:  “It’s nothing like a traffic ticket. You get ticketed when you’ve done something wrong, and if not, you fight it. This is the same stuff I always pack, and I checked the TSA website again last night. It’s all okay.”

Now he’s ignoring me and pulling out all the contents of my dopp kit and putting them into an institutional-green plastic tray. What goes into your dopp kit? Personal items. So I’m feeling personally offended. He pulls them all out, rescans my bag, then rescans the tray. No alarms go off, and there are no explosions. He comes back to me, still looking for some point to score.

Him (fingering the various small liquids from my dopp kit — things like shampoo, toothpaste, etc. — as well as a small aerosol can of shaving cream, a small pair of scissors for facial hair, and so forth):  “This all have to fit in bag.”

Me: “It was in the bag.”

Him:  “No. Quart bag.” Now he’s presenting me with a sample plastic quart bag. “You think it all fit in here?”

So now I’m picking up all my spilled contents to show him that they’ll fit into the bag. I’m dropping in the speck-sized hair conditioner, and mouthwash, and so forth. He holds up a cigar lighter that I’ve got that’s the size of half a little finger. “What about this?”

“That’s not a liquid,” I tell him. Now I’m determined to hold up his line. He can wait on me. In fact, the whole trip can wait on me. Let’s delay anyone and everyone, because this is completely unjustified, because I have followed their guidelines. “And before you say anything, those scissors are within guidelines. I know because I checked the website.”

I continue putting things into the bag, and he tries to show me that the mini aerosol can won’t fit in, and I tell him that that’s not a liquid either, and it’s under 4 ounces, and I’m waiting for him to pounce upon my cigar cutter — which as a notch cutter does not even contain a razor blade — when he grows tired of the game and says, “OK, OK, it all fit.” So I say, “Are you sure? I’m happy to go over all of it with you, even though it’s the same stuff I fly with all the time, right out of this airport, even though it’s the same stuff that complies with TSA guidelines.” He waves me on and I repack all my stuff, thinking about his hands having been on my toothbrush now,  and then I watch him detain the 97-year-old man who is also on this junket, a man who probably couldn’t have figured out how to operate an explosive or firearm if you did it for him. I get on the plane and do my best to put it behind me.

The next day, while on the tour, I read this story on my iPhone:  “TSA misses loaded gun in bag at LAX.” My favorite response from TSA to this story:  ” ‘It’s not a TSA issue. Our mandate is to screen baggage for explosives.’ “

So we just about do a scratch-and-sniff on Lee’s cream rinse, but a loaded gun on a plane? Of no concern to the Transportation SECURITY Administration.

I feel much safer now.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 28th, 2011 at 7:03 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.