Locked down with TSA in Salt Lake City

This is purely a personal complaint so don’t read it if you’ve better things to do (and you know you do).

Over our years of traveling we have been many places and gone through customs in every imaginable form. People who work customs are just doing a job, one that is highly routine and boring. They have to look at our passports, run them through scanners, ask us perfunctory questions. No, we are not carrying large amounts of money and have not purchased jewelry, and are not bringing in oranges or yams. We are tourists, and not on business.

The clerks who asks this stuff know we have just gotten off very long flights and are tired. They are bored, trained only to watch for things out of the ordinary such as darting eyes. Often enough, as at JFK Airport in New York, they have drug sniffing dogs. My wife was derailed from the normal flow one time in Denver because she was carrying cookies. We offered one to the TSA guy. He was not allowed to partake. In Alaska years ago we had purchased an ornament that looked like a long knife, and forgotten about it. It was something to hang on our wall. (That was when I first realized that if someone really wanted to blow up and maim a lot of people, the place to do it is in the pre-security area, where throngs of people are clumped into compressed spaces.)

Usually on return to Denver we breeze through, as they have many electronic machines to scan our passports. It goes fast. On this recent trip we were routed through Salt Lake City from Amsterdam (where we were moved to the head of the passport scanning line due to a short connection). Ahead was a ten hour flight. In Salt Lake there were no other international flights, just ours. We had one hour and forty minutes to make our connection to Denver. We missed it. The reason: TSA.

We were to arrive home at 3:30 PM, and instead had to take a later flight that was delayed on the runway due to storms in Denver, and arrived at 9PM. We flew KLM from Geneva to Amsterdam, and then Delta to home. The airlines were great. The ten hour flight (Delta Comfort) was long and I slept but a little and passed a lot of time watching Curb Your Enthusiasm. After all these years of overseas flighst, I go into a zone and time passes without complaint.

At least part of the problem was that Salt Lake City does not handle a great many international flights. There were maybe 300 people on our flight, the only one passing through customs. As is normal everywhere, and for God only knows why, they make us claim our luggage and re-check it. Usually that goes fast, but SLC was so very slow, one bag at a time dropping, plunk ….. plunk …. plunk. Ours was at the very end. Still, we had an hour to make our connection.

We went through a fast line with five or six people on duty who checked our passports. In reality, and this technology scares me, they shined a light in our eyes and our identities appeared in their screens, and we were waived through. That has happened before, knowing wh0 we are by our retinas or nose hairs. I do a lot of facial work, and people tell me that many of us look alike. It is not so.

So far, so good, and we passed through to another room where, because we were last to claim our  luggage, a very long line awaited. At the head was one lone clerk who was electronically scanning passports before we went through security. Even as we had done that in Geneva and never left an area where non-security scanned people had been allowed to enter, we had to do it again. Hello TSA!

It took a long, long time to get through that line, and we were beginning to fear we would miss our flight. When finally I got to the window I asked why we had to scan our passports, as Homeland or whatever they call themselves had already done that. The gal said that this was pre-flight boarding security, not entrance to the country. I said “Not a streamlined operation you run here.” One passport check ought to get it done. Maybe she flagged me as a troublemaker. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked.

There were maybe six people working, and God were they slow! Every bag had to be scanned by one guy sitting down and leaning back, taking his time. I was handed a card that said I did not have to take off my shoes, as we are TSAPre. I knew that and handed the card back. I waited as there was quite a backlog with only the one guy scanning, and when I got to the magic window was told that I had to take my shoes off. I said I was TSAPre, and they asked where was my card. I did not have it and so took off my shoes and went to put them with my other stuff for the scanning guy. I had to go to the end of the line they insisted.

The clock was ticking. Finally my backpack (but not shoes) came through the magical machine, but it was rerouted through a side rail where I was not allowed to go. A guy was sitting off to the side. I asked if I could just go get it, and was told no there was a problem. There was yet another TSA person who had to inspect it. There was a line, and I waited as bottles of water were discarded and the like. Finally mine came up, and she scanned it and there was a square object. My goddamned iPad, which normally raises no eyebrows. I reached across her and took it out of the kangaroo pouch on the back of my pack, and said “There. Can I go now?”

No, I was told. Both the pack and the iPad had to be scanned again, and were taken to the back of the line. I watched them. Regular luggage was being passed through normally, mine was on a side rail waiting, but not moving. I watched in frustration. Finally I asked loud enough that the whole room could hear “Do you people have any hurry in you?”

“What did you say to us?” a TSA man asked me, and I repeated the question. It brought laughter from other frustrated travelers, but otherwise, somewhere in the distance, a dog barked. There was no sense of urgency among any of the throng of TSA robots.

Finally my backpack, iPad, and shoes came through the magical machine. I grabbed them all, put on the pack, and carried them all and began walking as fast as I could to our gate in my socks to gate A6. My surgical ankle was screaming at me. One of the moving walkways was not working, welcome to Salt Lake. There were 29 gates in the A corridor, and hoping against hope, the first gate encountered was A29, not A1. The corridor was perhaps a half mile long. My wife was behind me, but I thought if I made it, they would wait for her.

I got to gate A6, a closed door and a notice that said DEPARTED.

OK. Shit happens. Airports suck.We got home only six hours later than we would have. The only thing we would have done with those six hours would have been to try and stay awake and get a head start on our jet lag. TSA forcing us to stay awake all that time was oddly beneficial.

But the thing that bugs me is this: It is Salt Lake City. They do not get a whole lot of international flights. They are not equipped for it. Also, TSA personnel, the folks who never studied for tests in high school and who would otherwise be bagging groceries or filling potholes, have too goddamned much power and too little to do in the way of meaningful function. I would bet that in the last 22 years since 911 they have yet to prevent one real threat, but have discarded countless water bottles, pocket knives and squirt guns.  They perform a useless function. (I know, 9/11 blah blah blah.)

We started out with ninety minutes to catch our plane. Every single one of those minutes was wasted standing in line and waiting for pointless people to perform pointless activities. If you are traveling out of the country and must pass through Salt Lake on return, make sure you have at least two hours to spare. Otherwise, you might not make it.