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They probably shouted at her for the best part of an hour. Sounds like current TSA procedure, amped up a few degrees. No, I'm not being a smarty-pants. When

• CodeMage 15y ago
  Communist Yugo-friggin-slavia While I agree with what you were trying to say, that was really uncalled for.
  • tripzilch 15y ago
    I don't understand, how so? Yugoslavia was a communist country back then? Although I doubt that his experience had much to do with the Cold War, but rather the internal pre-breakup tensions, war and the Kosovo/Serbia thing during the time.
  • bdunbar 15y ago
    What offended you - 'Communist' or 'friggin'?
    • CodeMage 15y ago
      The latter. I'm sorry for being sensitive about it -- maybe it's an overreaction -- but over the years, it really wears down the patience to see the name of the place I grew in dragged through the mud repeatedly. You might say it's our own damn fault, you might say my parents' generation and mine are to blame, I won't argue about that. You may criticize the communism, the backwater mentality, the ingrained sense of entitlement and lots of other things about (ex-)Yugoslavia. A lot of that stuff is the reason why I left. But please, keep it civil, for the sake of us poor schmucks that loved growing up in that place and then left it, disappointed.
      • bdunbar 15y ago
        Nothing offensive was intended by the word 'friggin'. Sorry you got your feelings hurt. BTW a friend of mine actually bought a Yugo. We made fun of it at the time, but in terms of gas mileage and how much he paid for it, it was a big winner.
      • fabricode 15y ago
        There are many uses of "friggen" or the word that it is being substituted for, and in this case, it has nothing to do with denigrating the object. By putting "friggen" into the middle of a word, you're verbally underlining / emphasizing it. Really emphasizing it, as is underlining it multiple times. For instance, in the movie Pretty Woman, when one of the two friends is trying to figure out someone for whom a relationship worked out, she responds with "Cinder-friggen-rella". ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100405/quotes?qt0466870 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100405/quotes?qt0466870 ) I know this is an overly-long response to a minor issue, but I just didn't want you thinking that someone was making fun of your country. Instead, I believe the person who originally said it was essentially trying to say "a really, really, really communist country" had a more appealing entry system than today's America.
        • bdunbar 15y ago
          I never thought of the word 'friggin' as super-underlining, but that is a good simile and what I intended it to mean. Thanks!
        • zem 15y ago
          the technical term is "tmesis", if you want to read more about it in a linguistic context.
          • bdunbar 15y ago
            the technical term is "tmesis" And I'm off to wikipedia for a while. It's Friday night and I just learned something - the weekend is off to a great start.
  • winestock 15y ago
    No, it is not uncalled for. Yugoslavia was the greatest thing that ever happened to the reputation of the Hapsburg dynasty. When my father tried to escape from the East Bloc, he was arrested by Communist troops in Slovenia. The commander in charge of the local troop deployment interrogated him and decided that he wasn't a threat to the state. He put my father back on the road and told him to walk. My father said to him: "I know how this works. You'll let me walk for a few steps and then you'll shoot me." The commander said "No, I'm not going to shoot you. Go." Sometimes, my father would tear up talking about it. That sort of thing did happen.
• excuse-me 15y ago
  It's a ridiculous comparison. I worked in a defense industry in 80s/90s and sometimes we had to visit Eastern Europe. We were carefully briefed about not carrying any company documents or the early laptops because they might be seized or copied at immigration. We should be careful about anything we said on the phone since calls may monitored and we should expect to be grilled on arrival for some imagined paperwork error. Now I work for a european aerospace/defense company - and the rules on visiting America are MUCH stricter.
  • weavejester 15y ago
    I'm not sure whether you typo'd or were displaying some black humour. Your company's rules for visiting the US today are really stricter than the rules for visiting Eastern Europe in the 80s/90s?
    • excuse-me 15y ago
      Yes because the risk is more real. In theory - my knowledge of the problems we had making the obsolete GR2 Tornado's radar work would have been useful to the Russian IF there had been a WWIII, and if they didn't already know. And that the East Germans might have passed it on if I had been silly enough to carry all my technical reports with me to Berlin in the 80s But my current phone has a list of all the calls/emails to my company's component suppliers and many customers and potential customers along with price and delivery info. We compete and in some cases also partner with US aerospace companies that the US undoubtedly consider vital for it's national defense. I am pretty confident that if the TSA copied my phone or laptops's contents - while looking for terrorist plots or MP3s and handed it over to the NSA or whoever. Then if they found info that could be of commercial value to Boeing/Lockheed Martin/Raytheon etc then the NSA are not going to be prevented from passing those on by a sense politeness to a foreign visitor! That's why I get a clean wiped 'travel' laptop and a dumb phone to take, I use a VPN to check my email and I don't chat on a cell phone about how which US airlines are thinking of not buying Boeing.