Tag: security

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Honoring those we lost in 2012

Now that we are a few days into the New Year, frequent traveler Bob Payne is taking a brief time out to honor those we lost in 2012.

Black carry-on bag – No name tag, but purple Barney-like sock puppet tied to handle. I was made to gate-check it on an American flight from Dallas Fort Worth to JFK. The woman at Customer Service was nice, but said the airline had enough problems of its own without having to look for my bag, too.

Wing-tip shoe – Left foot, men’s brown and white, size 9 ½ D. I was half way to my Southwest flight at Phoenix Sky Harbor before I noticed it was missing, and by the time I got back to the bin at the security gate it was gone. Kudos to the TSA, though, for letting me borrow a woman’s espadrille, left foot, same size as mine, even though it wasn’t really my color.

Rental car – Once you misplace your car keys, which I think must have fallen out of my pocket when I was wading in the fountain at the Princess on New Year’s Eve, losing your car, too, is really not that hard, especially if you can’t remember the make, color, or company you rented it from.

Family members who called from the airport, but never showed up at the reunion – more evidence that relying entirely on a GPS for driving directions can turn out to be a very bad idea.

Right leg below the knee – I now know that when you are picnicking along a river bank in Australia and see a yellow caution sign showing the outline of a crocodile painted in black it is not there for comic effect. On the other hand, I now have more use for the single left wing-tip shoe.

In his spare time, travel humor writer Bob Payne does the obituary column for his home-town newspaper.

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Full body scanners found to improve health of air travelers

In a startling study released today by the Travel Health Association of America, it has been found that while air travelers may complain about full body scanners, they may be benefitting from them, too.

“It appears that the fear of having one’s overweight, out-of-shape, naked body seen by anyone who can get a job at the TSA, or who has a friend who can, has encouraged air travelers to lose an average of 15 pounds since the machines were introduced in 2007,” said Travel Health Association spokesperson Bob Payne.

Adding support to the findings, Payne said, are that diet program and health club memberships among air travelers have increased “significantly” during the same period.

The results are so positive, Payne said, that the American Medical Association has suggested the TSA occasionally leak, or at least spread rumors that they might, an image of someone who could clearly benefit from losing a few pounds.

“The government will want to be careful, though,” Payne said, “because you remember the public relations disaster that resulted from trying to gain acceptance for the machines by having the images of all female passengers look like those of Brittany Spears.”

For readers who don’t recall, far too many agents, based on the results of the imaging, were attempting to propose to Spears, and Spears, in far too many cases, was accepting, slowing the already time-consuming screening process even further.

In one cautionary note, Payne warned that while very promising, the results of the study are not conclusive. “It could just be that the cancer-producing waves used in the imaging technology are suppressing appetite,” he said.

 

In addition to his duties at the Travel Health Association, travel humor writer Bob Payne works weekends for the TSA.

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Overly polite TSA agent causes JFK shutdown

JFK’s Terminal 4 was shut down for more than two hours yesterday following an incident that resulted from a poorly trained TSA agent accidentally saying “please” when asking a passenger to remove his shoes.

“I knew something wasn’t right when the guy failed to say anything about my garden rake,” said the passenger involved, Bob Payne, a yard equipment salesman from Pelham, New York.

Then, when the agent politely asked Payne to remove his shoes he said he was so shocked he involuntarily cried out, not realizing how much it would upset the chicken that the man behind him had in his carry-on, or that the drug-sniffing dogs would go after the chicken so aggressively.

“I can tell you all hell broke loose,” Payne said, “with just random passengers, including one old lady in a wheelchair, wrestling to the ground anyone who looked suspicious to them.”

A TSA supervisor on the scene said security experts were able to instantly run a background check on the agent involved, and discovered he’d been on the job less than a week. The check revealed, too, that he had previously worked distributing The Watchtower magazine for the Jehovah’s Witnesses. ”And sources tell us that’s a group notorious for programming its people to be polite to every member of the public.”

The supervisor said the agent had been put on administrative leave until he could be more thoroughly trained in proper TSA procedures. “He should be back at work by this afternoon,” the supervisor said.

In other news at JFK, a cash–strapped organization that looks after the health and welfare of airport employees announced it finally had the resources to hold the raffle they’d been planning for months. The prize, an organization spokesperson said, would be a chicken.

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TSA secrets the flying public doesn’t want you to know

Not since the days when the postal service mattered to anybody has a group of federal workers (Congress excepted) taken so much abuse as the agents of the TSA.

That the TSA performs a necessary function is clear. Their vigilance, study after study has shown, has resulted in airline passengers bringing aboard far fewer knives, handguns, and explosive devices than they used to.

Yet the abuse of TSA agents has become so pervasive it has been estimated that comedians such as Jay Leno (“Have you heard the TSA’s new slogan? ‘We handle more junk than eBay.'”) David Letterman (“TSA says they are going to crack down on the invasive pat-downs. In fact, one agent was transferred to another parish.”) and Conan O’Brien (“ I don’t mind being patted down by airport security, but I don’t like it when the guy says, ‘Now you do me.'”) would be hard pressed to get through their monologues without some reference to the alleged humiliation faced daily by the flying public.

Of course some of the abuse is well-deserved.  There’s no evidence to show that grandmothers in wheelchairs are more likely to commit terrorist acts than any other group. And what kind of person takes a stuffed animal away from a four-year-old boy, even if the animal does turn out to contain gun parts?

But try putting yourself in the shoes of a TSA agent. (Admittedly, not as easily done, at most security checkpoints, as TSA agents putting themselves in yours.) The fact is that the two things the flying public finds most outrageous about the airport security experience – pat downs and body scans – are the two things that make it most difficult for TSA agents to come to work each day (that and most of them don’t earn enough to own a car).

“Everybody says airport security is a system built on fear,” TSA spokesperson Daniel Butts said, “But what they don’t say is that the biggest fears are those faced by the TSA agents themselves. To understand why, you just need to look at most people making their way through an airport terminal, picture them naked, and then imagine having to run your hand up the inside of their thighs. It’s not exactly a Ken and Barbie world out there.”

Considering the stress that results, it is a wonder, Butts said, that the TSA team holds up as well as they have. “Sure, there have been cases of verbal abuse, theft, drug trafficking, and dealing in child pornography, but at least nobody’s gone postal.”

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