Coming Home from Chicago, Part 3
You guys have already heard about (and given your opinions on) people not pushing their bins and bags through security and not waiting for their turn to board. The final thing that irritated me (although sequentially it was actually the first thing) was TSA.
I actually haven’t had nearly the amount of bad TSA experiences that a lot of people have. At my small regional airport, where I am the most, they are pretty polite and actually very efficient. So I was shocked on Saturday, when one of the TSA agents was super rude to me.
The security lines at Midway were not super well defined, but I got into what seemed to be the shortest one. I was in line for a few minutes, and while no one had gotten behind me the other lines were getting longer and longer. One of the TSA agents came over to our line and put a divider right in front of me. “This line is closed,” she said, standing in front of me, folding her arms. I looked behind me to make sure the line hadn’t grown suddenly to epic proportions. It hadn’t. I said, “Could we not close it after me?” And she said, “This line is closed.”
Um, wow. So after waiting in line for almost ten minutes, I had to go find another line and get at the very end of it. Luckily, the people next to me invited me to get in front of them, which was very nice. But why did she decide to close it in front of me? There was no one behind me, and letting one more person through (me) would have had exactly the same effect. I guess the thing that made me the maddest was that it was so clearly a case of “I’m doing this because I can and you can’t say anything.” I know the TSA does worse things all the time, but seriously? Argh.
And there you have it. All the craziness I witnessed coming home from Chicago. Hopefully my next flight will be a little less dramatic!!
I’m sorry. I cringe when I read things like this, because I feel that these incidents reflect poorly on the city of Chicago and, more importantly, the residents of this great city. Please allow me to apologize on behalf of all Chicagoans.
She just picking on you.
Sorry to hear about this event at an otherwise pretty cool airport. Why did it happen? Think near minimum wage *itch with a nice white shirt, a tin badge that the need to throw around her considerable weight. TSA hires from the bottom of the pool and that’s what we get. Sorry to awaken you, but in most cities, this kind of behavior IS the norm. One more reason to avoid flying whenever possible. -C.
What was her name? You should have made note of it!
It’s unfortunate when situations like this happen; I would agree that if this happens again you should take down their name and possibly think about reporting them.