

Wait, what?
Like, at the time? Or still?
Wait, what?
Like, at the time? Or still?
I respectfully disagree on the TSA, anecdotally.
I know a few people who applied there simply because it WAS a job in their area that paid more than minimum wage and, at least until recently, by virtue of being a government job, it was more likely to actually care about federal protections for employees with disabilities than, say, retail work, which only gives the minimum required number of fucks, and only then when someone is watching or has a lawyer handy.
Also, a significantly larger amount of the population has unfortunately accepted the questionable stipulations of the patriot act than have decided due process is simply too much work, so I feel that’s a distance of an order or three of legal magnitude, comparison-wise.
I’m not saying everyone who works for the TSA is there due to lack of other options, but given it’s ubiquity and level of employee turnover in airport towns, at least SOME them are.
In theory that means they have newer scanners.
I say in theory because for sanity’s sake I hope that’s the case, but I also know how they’ve historically worked thanks to the likes of Bruce Schneier.
This is based on the TYPE of scanner each checkpoint has and that frequently differs from airport to airport.
The problem is, most of THEM don’t even know that, so yeah, you appear mind-bogglingly stupid to them and they look needlessly arcane and possibly deliberately cruel and rude to you.
AND it doesn’t matter WHAT the other airport let you do because what they let you do has everything to do with THEIR policies and scanner capabilities and whatever CURRENT airport you’re in follows a policy written with the equipment THEY have in mind.
Airport A lets you keep your laptop in the bag because their scanner is powerful enough to see through circuitboards and batteries to tell whether there’s C4 or whatever wedged in there or not, airport B has a “laptops out of bags and power it on for me please” because the scanner in airport B can’t see through all the semi-precious metals in the circuitboards and battery plates, but they’re pretty sure you can’t wedge enough C4 or whatever in there between the scan-blocking parts to do anything and still be able to turn the thing on.
But airport B does know what airport A does or has and it doesn’t matter because they don’t have it.
It’s shitty and we should have standardized if we were going to do it all, but I’m betting some actuary somewhere has actual statistics on the semi-effectiveness of having differing policies and the confusion that sows.
On paper it’s probably theoretically harder plan around a system you don’t know, or something.