Find The Boots

Rantings from a few corporate types about life, technology, travel, guns, politics, and everything good in the world.

Speaking of Sweaty Flyers

Thursday, August 24, 2006

Regular reader Griet (his real name, amazingly enough, he is willing to be known as our reader, so we salute him) writes in:

Last week I was coming from LAX to ORD to catch a flight home to Finnland. I'm standing there in line with a brand new tiny carryon just in case, festooned with premium flyer badges from five airlines. I'm just standing there in my beautiful English Travelling Suit (custom made, Saville Row, made for flying in!) [Ed - we hope you managed to hide that well!] as I call it.
I get pulled aside for a screening, which is fine, happens enough. And just then a pair of young Malaysian muslem men, mid-20's, rush up to the security queue and say they need to break line because they are late for their flight. They're sweaty and nervous and they're not dressed very well. Not students, not "away year", not business people. I lived there for two years, speak a little, and know the culture well - these guys were somewhat peculiar.
I idly commented to the screener who was groping my butt to see what was in my back pocket that I'd have thought those guys were prime candidates to pull as nervous flyers.
He said that they'd already "checked too many brown people and had to do some white guys for a while." I am very very white (Finnish) so I probably count for 10 regular over-tanned Americans or two pasty Britties, but, really, this statement floored me.

Ok, I cut out a lot of the very non-PC stuff after that, not because I don't overall agree with G-man, but because I think his use of American vernacular would get us blocked at a lot of firewalls.

Can we get a reader shout out to see if this is true? If it is, then I'm really horrified. The population of flyers is certainly not distributed evenly across and security shouldn't be insided some fake quota in some TSA guys head.

0 Comments:

Find The Boots

An executive goes on a business trip. When he arrives, it's raining cats and dogs. To avoid ruining his shoes, he purchases a pair of galoshes for $15, which he expenses under "Misc." on his expense report. A week later, the accounting department rejects his expense report, with a post-it note that says that the company does not reimburse for items of clothing. The next trip, the executive turns in an expense report without the galoshes, but with a post-it note that says "FIND THE BOOTS!".