Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

security detail

I dropped Rob off at National yesterday just after 9 a.m., then parked my car and met him inside the airport. He’d checked in for his flight and had gotten in the lengthy queue to get through security. (I’m a horrible judge both of distance and crowd count, so I’d say that the line was somewhere in the range of “within sight of the ID checker-person” and “if your flight’s now boarding, you may be out of luck,” but not so bad as “grumble audibly about the wait” or “fish out a book; you’ll be here a while.”) Despite the crowd, however, the line was moving through security at a fairly steady pace.

I expect that I’ll see much the same thing when I fly out tomorrow. Hopefully the wait at security won’t be so long; I’m actually worried more about the weather in Chicago, where I’m connecting for my flight to Tucson. (On a side note: What’s up with a city that is so succeptible to the vagaries of intense winter weather being such a major transportation hub for the whole country?)

There have been a lot of stories over the past few years about the consumer or administrative side of airport security — customer complaints, funding or lack thereof, what you can or cannot take with you onboard an airplane, information privacy. Today’s Washington Post has a story that looks at things from a different angle: The day-to-day, low-paid, mind-numbing drudgery that is working as an airport security screener. (“The Other Side of Airport Security” - 12/23/04)

(It’s more comforting, perhaps, than this account by a LaGuardia screener in Wired magazine about her experience working for the TSA. (“Confessions of a Baggage Screener” - Sept. 2003).)