Boatrocker wrote:O Really wrote: . . . Learn to deal with it instead of bitching about every little thing . . . .
Gonna have to disagree on that point. It's too much like being a good nazi for my tastes. The whole TSA thing is a total and extraordinary waste of time and money and has made traveling by air an exercise in masochism. It's bad enough to expect the abuse heaped upon us by the airline; submitting to this collection of pure fucking asshole idiots that the TSA seems to screen for is not something we should do passively or quietly.
Just my opinion. I don't fly except for unusual circumstances.
I fly a lot. I'm not happy about all of it, and I usually follow a personal "6 hour" rule. If I can drive it in 6 hours, I drive. In the past 3 or 4 months or so, I've been through security in Asheville, LaGuardia, Newark, Ft. Lauderdale, National, Charlotte, SeaTac, and Green Bay - some more than once. Joining me in that experience were hundreds of thousands of others, joined by millions nationwide. In the vast majority of cases, travelers incur at worst a relatively minor inconvenience, most of which they should know to expect. Only on one trip (Newark) did I spend more than 20 minutes on line, typically less than 10. I've been wanded, scanned, and "groped," without running into the "asshole idiots" that must abound at the airports I don't go through, or who work on lines I missed. I'm on the TSA pre-check program and that helps a little but not much - mostly I don't have to take off my shoes.
They may have some unnecessary requirements - hell maybe any search and scan is unnecessary, but it's hardly "good nazi" to make your own life better by avoiding making the TSA guy's life harder. In addition to the "little gun," security checks found a bunch of real weapons in a recent week...
http://blog.tsa.gov/
I think there are a lot of improvements in security checks that could be made, from the travelers' perspective, but in my experience it's not TSA who heaps the most misery on the travelers - it's the airlines themselves.