No, seriously, they do.  This column by Daniel Rubin on Philly.Com HERE has all the details but I’ll summarize.

It would seem that some TSA guard decided to search a woman’s luggage and then pulled out a small, clear plastic white baggie filled with white powder and then asked “OK, where did you get it?”  He kept her going for a bit of time and then confessed it was a joke.  The woman, a young college student, was, in the meantime, picturing her entire life crumbling around here and wondering just how someone got to her luggage.  She was, quite literally, in tears as she walked away.

Yeah, the TSA investigated and then fired the guard.  So what. 

Seriously, so what.  Firing that employee isn’t going to fix an endemic problem.  It isn’t going to send the right message to the other poorly trained guards.  So, so what?  It doesn’t fix a thing. 

This kind of behaviour, this lack of professional conduct is seen by travelers every day of the year.  I have watched TSA guards verbally abuse passengers, shout at kids, act with retribution towards passengers who had the courage to question an behaviour and even attempt to steal from people.  Yeah, that last item is something I personally experienced several years ago in the airport in Atlanta. 

That’s the problem.  We don’t have a well trained, professional group of agents capable of protecting us.  We have an extremely irregular set of people who apparently are more interested in money, jokes or abuse than doing their job which is, quite literally, to prevent an air catastrophe. 

And people wonder why we don’t feel safe in the air.

Filed under: Airports by ajax