No Spikey Hair For You!
I’m traveling for Adaptive Path’s UX Week in DC where I’ll be doing the Communicating Concepts Through Comics presentation, this time without the aid of Jane.Before that though, I’m making a quick stop in New York to hang out with my friends on this coast. Of course, no travel of mine is complete without a story. Not that I didn’t have a feeling something would happen given Thursday’s incident with the foiled McGyver bomb plot and my flying to New York the day after.
The day started with Orbitz calling me to tell me my flight was delayed by half an hour. Off to a great start. As I take the BART over to SFO, I wonder about what I should do with my bag. All shampoo, gel, contact solution and other liquids were no longer permitted on board in the cabin area. As a friend joked, “your hairstyle is banned in the UK.”
Technically, what I use is a wax so it would have been fine anyways but I kind of doubt a run of the mill TSA person would say, “Oh that’s fine. That’s a Sumotech Bumble and Bumble hair wax as opposed to a Revlon Super Hold Extra Shine Fozzie Scented Gel.” Not to mention I had completely forgotten about the whole contact solution bit. I’d already checked in online but figured just in case, I’ll check my bag in.
Surprisingly, checking in and going through security went without a hitch. As I stopped somewhere to get some lunch I looked at the signs and realized that not only can you not pass security with drinks, you also can’t bring the drinks you buy on the air side onto the plane. H’okay … more on the stupidity of this later.
The flight makes reasonable time back and we arrive at 10:22. My connecting flight is 10:35 in another terminal for which I have to take a shuttle to. Half the plane runs off the plane and towards the shuttle, each of us trying to yell our respective gates and flights to a US Airways staff member to get them to wait for us. I get there and it looks closed but it turns out they’re working on their standby situation. A crew passenger was on the flight taking a standby seat but I was a confirmed passenger so they let me on … by kicking him off. He looked rather pissed to say the least and I can’t blame him. Apparently they had put him on and off the plane a couple of times already.
Arriving in New York, I’m happy that I made it today instead of staying the night in Philly. As I wait and wait for my baggage, I see the handler picking up the bags off the conveyor. This meant only one thing: there were no more bags to come. Fuck.
In hindsight, it’s pretty obvious that my bag would still be in Philly since I barely made it on the plane myself, the likelihood of them putting that kind of efficiency to my bag was…zero. Actually, less than zero because I found out that now ags go through homeland security again when transferring flights. Because I’m so likely to have stopped by and added something to my checked bag.
When I finally got to Jeremy’s place, I passed a Ben & Jerry’s underneath his apartment and it was still open at 1:20am. A
Cherry Garcia was exactly what I needed. I may have to move to this city after all.
Random Security Observations
During the course of this I was thinking about whether these measures were just a facade and how much they accomplished. It’s good actually that they don’t allow drinks on even purchased on air side since it’s easy enough to plant something in the supply and have an air side employee “sell it” but there’s no checks in place to enforce this. In fact, on my PHI-LGA flight, I saw the woman in front of me had a bottle of mineral water in her purse – on the first day of high alert.
Lighters have always been prohibited and yet they still always seem to pass through—again, on the first day of high alert.
The plot in the UK involved one airport staff person yet there’s no noticeable action being taken to do additional background checks on the staff. How hard is it for them to substitute the airline provided soda bottles?
I was discussing these and other things with the US Airways person handling my lost luggage (I’ve done this stuff enough that I don’t get mad at the wrong people) and how the security measures didn’t seem to help and how people were blaming US Airways when they had no control over it. Through the conversation I accidentally said, “bomb” in a sentence and covered my mouth…he said it was fine where we were (land side I guess he meant) but as we got to talking about how an airport staff was involved in the UK plot, he lowered his voice and told me there was a camera and we were being recorded and probably should stop talking about that. Land of the free!
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