It’s 6:14AM and I’m sitting near Gate 23 at the Long Beach airport.
Since many people have never had the chance to visit this little place, let me set the scene for you…
LGB is a tiny little airport with basically 3 check-in counters. Delta has one window, America West and Alaska share one, and JetBlue has the additions 6 or so. thats is. Thats the whole airport. It’s a 1930’s building that somehow made it into 2006 without major modifications to the main structure. There are, however, major additions out back near the runways. The actual gates to wait for boarding are in two moudular trailer-type mfg buildings. I would say each is about 4500 square feet. JetBlue has one, and the rest of the airlines share the other. It’s a pretty interesting place. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of the big airports (restaurants, bars, shops, mallish things…) but I gladly give all that up for the convenience of a simple check-in a gate process. And it would be simple, if the damned TSA wasn’t in the middle pissing everyone off.
I don’t know if some huge machine in the basement of the CIA headquarters is going to catch this message and send me a nasty-gram for openly hating a governmental body (this would be behind the IRS, and Postal Service of course), but it’s got to be said that the security screening process is unbelievably overcomplicated without making me feel any safer. It’s just a bunch of A** holes who are trying to follow whatever bullshit instruction they were given during roll call that morning. They could care less about me, or my safety on this flight… they care about their $8.50 per hour and I’m just another schmuck they have to deal with while they wait for the end of their shift.
I watched this 20 year old pimple faced asshat lecture an old woman about how she should have had her Tylenol in a plastic bag separate from the rest of her possessions. It wasn’t a simple, descreet instruction like it could have been… oh no, this shit tard yelled at the poor old lady from across the top of the monitor that had just finished spitting out my shoes, belt, and underwear. I said “no need to yell, we can all hear you” to which he replied “calm down sir or I’m going to have to call somebody over here”. Fearing that I may be in handcuffs soon I just shut up and smiled at the old lady. She thanked me as I put my belt back on, and we had a little laugh together.
Seriously though. When it comes to air travel, we’ve just given up too much freedom with what I imagine is only very marginally successful screenings. I’ve never heard on the news of the TSA screener ever foiling plots or catching any kind of bad guy. They aren’t heros or even helpful. Maybe there are some good ones, but I have never run across them. In my experience they are all disinterested asses who only endeavor to wield fake authority to annoy people who just want to get from A to B.
I would like to get a lot more graphic in my descriptions… but I’ve recently been informed that this is a family blog (we’ve got some young readers).
anyway. I’m in the airport and a little cranky. Lets hope the flight goes a little better.
Interesting that you should bring up the Long Beach Airport. We flew out of that airport about 12 hours after you 🙂 We had a similar experience with security. After being explained the new “liquid rules” consisting of putting stuff in a ziploc bag, we were asked if we had any liquids to declare (sounds an awful lot like customs). We told them we had put all of our liquids in our checked luggage. As our bags went though the X-ray, they told us that we had violated the policy and that some items from our bags were going to be confiscated. They proceeded to open our bags (in front of me and my two girls) and pulled out 2 small snow globes – one from Disneyland and one from SeaWorld. You got it. In front of my 2 girls who’d just had the most wonderful time in their life and had gotten a couple of souveniers to remember it by, TSA told us that they were going to take the snow globes and throw them away. If we had declared them and put them in a ziploc bag, we would have been OK, but because we violated the policy, they were confiscating them. First of all, I didn’t see them on the prohibited list http://www.tsa.gov/travelers/airtravel/prohibited/permitted-prohibited-items.shtm.
After arguing at length with TSA, they decided to do the little ionizer scan on them (that they sometimes do on laptops and such), and said that we could take them if we promised never to carry a snow globe on a plane again.
Don’t forget this is all for your safety.
Right 🙂