6 ms·

Yeah, it's always up to the whims of the underpaid TSA agent who happens to be there that day. Back when iPads were new, I got scolded for taking it out of my b

Yeah, it's always up to the whims of the underpaid TSA agent who happens to be there that day. Back when iPads were new, I got scolded for taking it out of my bag, and scolded for leaving it in my bag, by agents at the same airport on two trips a few weeks apart.

jcims 8y ago
In the last 8 days: CMH->MCO ‘remove your belts please’ MCO->SEA ‘keep your belts on’ SEA->CMH ‘i’d recommend you take your belt off’
- blankobj 8y ago
  I was on a business trip in a suit years ago and had to take my belt off. By the time I got through, someone took my belt. TSA agents couldn't find it. Didn't have time to do much else besides suck it up. I was flying w/ a superior mentioned TSA lost it. Not sure if he believed me... but definitely cost a lot to buy a new belt at the next airport. Still had my laptop though.
- jkqwzsoo 8y ago
  At one point, I was travelling with my dad when the "shoes off" policy was relaxed (I think the shoes-off policy was relaxed a couple of weeks/months after the shoe bomber plot, but I can't recall exactly when -- and then it was put back permanently). "Agent": Sir, I recommend you take your shoes off. Dad: That's okay. I don't need to take my shoes off. "Agent": Sir, I'm going to need you to take your shoes off NOW! In addition to challenging the authority of the Memphis TSA agent, my dad is half Japanese and looks quite a bit less white than I do.
  - smelendez 8y ago
    I've seen this sort of things in videos of police encounters, too. "I suggest you do X" or "would you mind doing X" is some officers' way of being polite, but it leads to dangerous misunderstandings. When people say no, taking the statement literally, cops see them as trying to start a fight. I'd love to see law enforcement trained in using basic, declarative sentences: "Sir, regulation X.Y.Z says you have to take your shoes off. Please step aside, do so, and rejoin the line."
    - rhizome 8y ago
      Don't say "no," don't be confrontational, don't say anything. They'll be obvious about it if it's not optional.
      - dbdjfjrjvebd 8y ago
        It should not be the responsibility of individual members of the public not be threatened or assaulted by the authorities! Such rapid escalation from friendly to threatening should be a retraining issue.
      - Reelin 8y ago
        > They'll be obvious about it if it's not optional. I don't believe this is required (or even typical) in the US. Law enforcement is generally allowed to make non-mandatory requests and hope that you comply with them. A prime example is needing to explicitly invoke your right to remain silent (https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127352150 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127352...). You might also look up videos of people refusing to cooperate with the immigration checkpoints in various states along the Mexican border.
    - seandougall 8y ago
      That would require them to know what regulation backs up their request. Which in turn would require such a regulation to exist. TSA has a particularly bad track record on this (to be fair, the regulations did change absurdly rapidly for the first decade or so of their existence), but I’ve even encountered this problem with police officers.
  - scruple 8y ago
    My father has stopped flying entirely. He's got a pacemaker and sometimes needs a cane and has a small list of medications that he legitimately needs to have with him at all times. He's diabetic, as well. Though he's not very overweight, he just doesn't move as well as he once did. TSA has made flying for him and people like him so incredibly difficult. He's just opted out. I don't blame him, either, though it does make visits more challenging now. I mean honestly.... Why do people like this have to take their shoes off and manage all of their carry-ons and personals into bins and onto belts and ... The entire farce of the TSA is all so callous and genuinely stupid.
    - aeternus 8y ago
      I'd really like to see an analysis of the total number of passenger-minutes that are spent waiting in TSA lines. Divide that by the avg human lifespan and compare it to the number of people killed or injured by a terrorist attack. When looked at like that, TSA costs more total lifetimes than have ever been taken through terrorist attacks.
      - fgonzag 8y ago
        By multiple orders of magnitude proabably. I'm going to go ahead and call 5000 people who have been killed by aviation terrorism events. Assuming they all live to 90 years old, that's 450,000 man years tragically lost. The FAA website stats that 630,000,000 people fly per year. If each of them takes 10 minutes to cross the line, that's 105,000,000 man-years lost per year...
        jcims 8y ago
        You’re mixing man years and man hours. But it’s still over 11,000 man years spent in lines at the airport.
        fgonzag 8y ago
        Wow, you're absolutely right. Screwed the math hard there. 10 minutes was a very low estimate though, especially in bigger airports like Seattle, SF, NYC.
- inferiorhuman 8y ago
  Yeah they told me to leave my belt on before going through the metal detector at OAK a few years ago. That worked out about as well as expected. More recently I flew out of JFK T4 a couple times (protip: don't) and on one of these trips all hell broke loose when someone's pet cat escaped. Security theater indeed.
- deathanatos 8y ago
  SFO->PDX: "Remove all electronics and any metal from your person." "You can keep your watch on." I'm wearing a smart watch, of course, with plenty of metal in its construction. Nowadays, I just stash anything not made from cotton in the bag to go through the X-ray well before I get into range where TSA officers can given contradicting instructions and then berate me for not following their directives.
mevile 8y ago
> I got scolded for taking it out of my bag, and scolded for leaving it in my bag, by agents at the same airport on two trips a few weeks apart. You are describing the the usual daily cluster-fuck of life in the military, and in fact, government service in general. I don't know why it is that way, but it is. I have not experienced it in my now 20 years of life in the private sector, but back when I was in the military it's just like that, all the time.
- Zak 8y ago
  If I had to guess about the military, it would be a combination of the fact that doing it wrong gets people killed, a constant need to optimize, improve, or respond to changing conditions, and a lack of sophistication to tell the two apart.
  - hopler 8y ago
    It's more because military is a jobs program for unemployables
    - yspeak 8y ago
      What as disgraceful comment.
- Godel_unicode 8y ago
  This is what happens when you compensate people with authority rather than, you know, money.
warent 8y ago
It's always so strange to me that people seem to consistently have bad experiences with TSA. I've travelled more than the average person and have never had a bad experience with TSA. Maybe because I'm a young white male? Once I even accidentally packed a small toolkit in my carry-on rather than my checked luggage and they let me keep it!
- umanwizard 8y ago
  How do you react to petty authority figures in general? How much did it bother you when, for example, elementary school playground monitors enforced arbitrary rules capriciously? It bothered me a lot, to the extent that I still have vivid memories of it, and I also hate the TSA with every fiber of my being. So I think it might just be a personality thing.
  - throwawayjava 8y ago
    I've been thinking about this lately because I also hate the TSA way more than is even remotely rational. Even for frequent fliers, the TSA is pretty far down on any rational list of complaints about government. I fly almost every week, but in the past 12 months I have probably spent a lot more time at city hall on a stupid residential parking permit than I did in (non-customs) airport security lines. In addition to personality, a lot of people project much larger political ideologies onto the TSA. You see a lot of that even in this comment section.
    - umanwizard 8y ago
      Right, I'll be the first to admit that it isn't totally rational. I get much more upset about the TSA, since I see their petty authoritarianism face to face, than I do about things that affect me much more but only indirectly.
    - Reelin 8y ago
      > the TSA is pretty far down on any rational list of complaints about government Only if focusing exclusively on direct interactions. From an ideological perspective, I don't think it's projection (your wording) to observe that in their current form they align closely with both general government authoritarianism and the exercise of federal power over the states. From a pragmatic perspective, I think it's perfectly reasonable to be alarmed about how such security measures seem to normalize invasive government behaviors in general. Societal norms and values aren't static, so how we do things in the present can and does affect how the public views things in the future.
chipx86 8y ago
I actually got in trouble more for leaving a Kindle and a game system in a bag on my last trip than on the previous trip when I accidentally had a utility knife in my bag's pocket. I was sure I was about to be detained for the knife, but they simply told me I could leave it there or exit the security line and mail it back to my house for a $15 fee. I took that mailer option, walked out of the line unescorted with a knife, filled out a mailing form, put the knife in the bag, and went through security again. This most recent trip, I checked carefully for knives before heading to SFO. When I entered the line, they were low on bins. I started taking things out and asked if I needed to remove the Kindle and game system. The TSA agent said I could leave them in, so I did. By the time I got to the other end, I was pulled aside and questioned, as they checked for any suspicious residue on the devices. They eventually handed me the devices back and escorted me to the beginning of the line, where I had to go through all over again, this time with the Kindle and game system in a bin.
chrischen 8y ago
They just love to scold. It's the only time in their life they are an authority figure.
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  Scolding is the essential foundational mentality of the job. They get paid to actively look for bad behavior. This makes it very easy to find all things to be suspicious at a minimum. It actually makes it quite hard to not start seeing everything and everyone through a suspicious lens. The odds are good that there are additional structural reinforcements. They probably don't get rewarded for anything else. They may even get actively penalized for not behaving that way. At my corporate job, I was instructed to a. Look for a reason to pay a claim rather than looking for a reason to deny it and b. Look out for the customer rather than cover my own ass. Then I had a claim for a benefit that was only paid once a year. I knew the six week period it occurred in, but not the actual date. I got dinged by Quality for paying it. My ultimate solution: I no longer work there. But most people just do what they need to do to get their damn paycheck. Fighting the good fight is usually not what they get rewarded for. Office Space: "I have 7 bosses. If I do something right, no one cares. If I do something wrong, everyone comes down on me like a ton of bricks. I spend all my time trying to not get yelled at." (Or words to that effect.)
gumby 8y ago
Think how depressing it must be to collect a paycheck to annoy people to do something you know is utterly pointless.
- tjpnz 8y ago
  Are you sure they know that themselves? As others here have noted TSA agents aren't the most employable/educated types.

jcims 8y ago

In the last 8 days: CMH->MCO ‘remove your belts please’ MCO->SEA ‘keep your belts on’ SEA->CMH ‘i’d recommend you take your belt off’

blankobj 8y ago
I was on a business trip in a suit years ago and had to take my belt off. By the time I got through, someone took my belt. TSA agents couldn't find it. Didn't have time to do much else besides suck it up. I was flying w/ a superior mentioned TSA lost it. Not sure if he believed me... but definitely cost a lot to buy a new belt at the next airport. Still had my laptop though.
jkqwzsoo 8y ago
At one point, I was travelling with my dad when the "shoes off" policy was relaxed (I think the shoes-off policy was relaxed a couple of weeks/months after the shoe bomber plot, but I can't recall exactly when -- and then it was put back permanently). "Agent": Sir, I recommend you take your shoes off. Dad: That's okay. I don't need to take my shoes off. "Agent": Sir, I'm going to need you to take your shoes off NOW! In addition to challenging the authority of the Memphis TSA agent, my dad is half Japanese and looks quite a bit less white than I do.
- smelendez 8y ago
  I've seen this sort of things in videos of police encounters, too. "I suggest you do X" or "would you mind doing X" is some officers' way of being polite, but it leads to dangerous misunderstandings. When people say no, taking the statement literally, cops see them as trying to start a fight. I'd love to see law enforcement trained in using basic, declarative sentences: "Sir, regulation X.Y.Z says you have to take your shoes off. Please step aside, do so, and rejoin the line."
  - rhizome 8y ago
    Don't say "no," don't be confrontational, don't say anything. They'll be obvious about it if it's not optional.
    - dbdjfjrjvebd 8y ago
      It should not be the responsibility of individual members of the public not be threatened or assaulted by the authorities! Such rapid escalation from friendly to threatening should be a retraining issue.
    - Reelin 8y ago
      > They'll be obvious about it if it's not optional. I don't believe this is required (or even typical) in the US. Law enforcement is generally allowed to make non-mandatory requests and hope that you comply with them. A prime example is needing to explicitly invoke your right to remain silent (https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127352150 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127352...). You might also look up videos of people refusing to cooperate with the immigration checkpoints in various states along the Mexican border.
  - seandougall 8y ago
    That would require them to know what regulation backs up their request. Which in turn would require such a regulation to exist. TSA has a particularly bad track record on this (to be fair, the regulations did change absurdly rapidly for the first decade or so of their existence), but I’ve even encountered this problem with police officers.
- scruple 8y ago
  My father has stopped flying entirely. He's got a pacemaker and sometimes needs a cane and has a small list of medications that he legitimately needs to have with him at all times. He's diabetic, as well. Though he's not very overweight, he just doesn't move as well as he once did. TSA has made flying for him and people like him so incredibly difficult. He's just opted out. I don't blame him, either, though it does make visits more challenging now. I mean honestly.... Why do people like this have to take their shoes off and manage all of their carry-ons and personals into bins and onto belts and ... The entire farce of the TSA is all so callous and genuinely stupid.
  - aeternus 8y ago
    I'd really like to see an analysis of the total number of passenger-minutes that are spent waiting in TSA lines. Divide that by the avg human lifespan and compare it to the number of people killed or injured by a terrorist attack. When looked at like that, TSA costs more total lifetimes than have ever been taken through terrorist attacks.
    - fgonzag 8y ago
      By multiple orders of magnitude proabably. I'm going to go ahead and call 5000 people who have been killed by aviation terrorism events. Assuming they all live to 90 years old, that's 450,000 man years tragically lost. The FAA website stats that 630,000,000 people fly per year. If each of them takes 10 minutes to cross the line, that's 105,000,000 man-years lost per year...
      - jcims 8y ago
        You’re mixing man years and man hours. But it’s still over 11,000 man years spent in lines at the airport.
        fgonzag 8y ago
        Wow, you're absolutely right. Screwed the math hard there. 10 minutes was a very low estimate though, especially in bigger airports like Seattle, SF, NYC.
inferiorhuman 8y ago
Yeah they told me to leave my belt on before going through the metal detector at OAK a few years ago. That worked out about as well as expected. More recently I flew out of JFK T4 a couple times (protip: don't) and on one of these trips all hell broke loose when someone's pet cat escaped. Security theater indeed.
deathanatos 8y ago
SFO->PDX: "Remove all electronics and any metal from your person." "You can keep your watch on." I'm wearing a smart watch, of course, with plenty of metal in its construction. Nowadays, I just stash anything not made from cotton in the bag to go through the X-ray well before I get into range where TSA officers can given contradicting instructions and then berate me for not following their directives.

mevile 8y ago

> I got scolded for taking it out of my bag, and scolded for leaving it in my bag, by agents at the same airport on two trips a few weeks apart. You are describing the the usual daily cluster-fuck of life in the military, and in fact, government service in general. I don't know why it is that way, but it is. I have not experienced it in my now 20 years of life in the private sector, but back when I was in the military it's just like that, all the time.

Zak 8y ago
If I had to guess about the military, it would be a combination of the fact that doing it wrong gets people killed, a constant need to optimize, improve, or respond to changing conditions, and a lack of sophistication to tell the two apart.
- hopler 8y ago
  It's more because military is a jobs program for unemployables
  - yspeak 8y ago
    What as disgraceful comment.
Godel_unicode 8y ago
This is what happens when you compensate people with authority rather than, you know, money.

warent 8y ago

It's always so strange to me that people seem to consistently have bad experiences with TSA. I've travelled more than the average person and have never had a bad experience with TSA. Maybe because I'm a young white male? Once I even accidentally packed a small toolkit in my carry-on rather than my checked luggage and they let me keep it!

umanwizard 8y ago
How do you react to petty authority figures in general? How much did it bother you when, for example, elementary school playground monitors enforced arbitrary rules capriciously? It bothered me a lot, to the extent that I still have vivid memories of it, and I also hate the TSA with every fiber of my being. So I think it might just be a personality thing.
- throwawayjava 8y ago
  I've been thinking about this lately because I also hate the TSA way more than is even remotely rational. Even for frequent fliers, the TSA is pretty far down on any rational list of complaints about government. I fly almost every week, but in the past 12 months I have probably spent a lot more time at city hall on a stupid residential parking permit than I did in (non-customs) airport security lines. In addition to personality, a lot of people project much larger political ideologies onto the TSA. You see a lot of that even in this comment section.
  - umanwizard 8y ago
    Right, I'll be the first to admit that it isn't totally rational. I get much more upset about the TSA, since I see their petty authoritarianism face to face, than I do about things that affect me much more but only indirectly.
  - Reelin 8y ago
    > the TSA is pretty far down on any rational list of complaints about government Only if focusing exclusively on direct interactions. From an ideological perspective, I don't think it's projection (your wording) to observe that in their current form they align closely with both general government authoritarianism and the exercise of federal power over the states. From a pragmatic perspective, I think it's perfectly reasonable to be alarmed about how such security measures seem to normalize invasive government behaviors in general. Societal norms and values aren't static, so how we do things in the present can and does affect how the public views things in the future.

chipx86 8y ago

I actually got in trouble more for leaving a Kindle and a game system in a bag on my last trip than on the previous trip when I accidentally had a utility knife in my bag's pocket. I was sure I was about to be detained for the knife, but they simply told me I could leave it there or exit the security line and mail it back to my house for a $15 fee. I took that mailer option, walked out of the line unescorted with a knife, filled out a mailing form, put the knife in the bag, and went through security again. This most recent trip, I checked carefully for knives before heading to SFO. When I entered the line, they were low on bins. I started taking things out and asked if I needed to remove the Kindle and game system. The TSA agent said I could leave them in, so I did. By the time I got to the other end, I was pulled aside and questioned, as they checked for any suspicious residue on the devices. They eventually handed me the devices back and escorted me to the beginning of the line, where I had to go through all over again, this time with the Kindle and game system in a bin.

chrischen 8y ago

They just love to scold. It's the only time in their life they are an authority figure.

DoreenMichele 8y ago
Scolding is the essential foundational mentality of the job. They get paid to actively look for bad behavior. This makes it very easy to find all things to be suspicious at a minimum. It actually makes it quite hard to not start seeing everything and everyone through a suspicious lens. The odds are good that there are additional structural reinforcements. They probably don't get rewarded for anything else. They may even get actively penalized for not behaving that way. At my corporate job, I was instructed to a. Look for a reason to pay a claim rather than looking for a reason to deny it and b. Look out for the customer rather than cover my own ass. Then I had a claim for a benefit that was only paid once a year. I knew the six week period it occurred in, but not the actual date. I got dinged by Quality for paying it. My ultimate solution: I no longer work there. But most people just do what they need to do to get their damn paycheck. Fighting the good fight is usually not what they get rewarded for. Office Space: "I have 7 bosses. If I do something right, no one cares. If I do something wrong, everyone comes down on me like a ton of bricks. I spend all my time trying to not get yelled at." (Or words to that effect.)

gumby 8y ago

Think how depressing it must be to collect a paycheck to annoy people to do something you know is utterly pointless.

tjpnz 8y ago
Are you sure they know that themselves? As others here have noted TSA agents aren't the most employable/educated types.