A Brief Rant About the TSA
tl;dr: I took a flight, and my belongings ended up crushed, dented, opened, wrinkled and dirty in a bag that I was locked out of. Fuck the TSA. We can do better than this.
I found out the hard way that the TSA mistook a number of my belongings for, I guess, explosives.
Wrist rests for a keyboard: the wrists rests are solid rubber, so I guess almost by definition they look like blocks of plastic explosives. I had actually left these accessible, guessing that this might happen.
Textbook: a TSA agent once pulled a thick deck of cards out from my carry-on, and when I asked why, explained that they have a similar density to plastic explosives (are you noticing a theme yet?). I guess I should have made the leap to textbooks, but also, can they seriously not tell the difference on their machines? Do they have to rip open every single bag that has a book in it?
Hard plastic case for glasses: this one is more amusing and telling than it is annoying. They’d unscrewed the top of the case, but were too stupid or lazy to put it back on and just left it in the suitcase unattached. Here I’m imagining the TSA interview process: can you figure out if this peg goes into the round or square hole? That’s okay, you’re hired anyway.
Glass jar of delicious chocolate spread: they took this jar out of its protective coccoon made of my socks and moved it halfway across the suitcase, unpadded and against the outside. Score one for the hard-sided suitcase, I guess, because the lid ended up with a serious dent but the glass didn’t break.
iPad: this had been packed with other flat things like the textbook, like any sane person would do, and ended up jammed in on the diagonal with its center resting on the corner of the aforementioned textbook. It’s fortunate the corner of the book didn’t end up punching a nice dent into the screen.
Chocolate bars: they opened my bars of chocolate, I guess to judge my taste in candy. This reminds me of a time that they once asked me to take my brown-bagged sandwich off the X-ray conveyor and open it myself to prove it wasn’t, I don’t know, a ham-based explosive?
Empty wooden box: I brought a neat little wooden box to put presents in, which had been wrapped in a sweater to prevent scratches and dents and to keep the corners from punching holes in other items. I guess it also looks like plastic explosives.
Leather boots: I brought some boots whose dirty bottoms I had tucked against the edge of the suitcase to keep them away from my clothes. After taking the sweater off of the wooden box they wrapped the sweater around one, only one, of the dirty boots. Who the hell pads shoes? More importantly, who pads only one shoe?
Other casualities: there was miscellaneous other damage and inconvenience, like half my clothes ending up wrinkled and a board game box being crushed because they pack suitcases like impatient raccoons rather than human adults with normally-developed spatial reasoning skills.
The kicker: the suitcase handle had an old, unused TSA-compatible lock dangling off the handle. It was unused because I don’t have the key because these locks are useless and offensive to my principles1 and I had inherited the suitcase from someone else. They helpfully locked me out of my own suitcase so that on arrival after midnight I had to ask my hosts to go find a hacksaw somewhere so I could break into my own luggage.
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Seriously, what a stupid idea. These locks are intended to be opened by the people you “voluntarily” give your luggage to. The rest of your luggage you shouldn’t leave unattended anyway, even if there weren’t terrorists hiding around every corner. So what are they preventing? ↩