Airport insecurity

Airport insecurity, originally uploaded by captainjay.

I forgot to do this post last week. Its pretty funny. A friend of ours flew out last Friday for a visit back home. She had a 9am flight so she arrived 2 hours before like they suggest which should be plenty of time for that time of day. She was flying American so she tried using the self service kiosk to check in and print boarding passes. She tried several times and could not get checked in. So she had to stand in line at the ticket counter which by now had gotten pretty long. It took an hour and a half to get up to the counter! There was only one person and they were taking their sweet time. So by this time the plane was already pre- boarding so they would not let her check her bag because it was too close to take off time. After much debate she finally gave up and agreed to take her bag as carryon. Since it was over sized for a carryone they told her she would have to check it at the gate. So she goes through security but gets stopped and questioned. They wanted to know why she was so late getting to the airport and why she has such a big bag for a carryon. She had to explain the situation but they still went through the bag. She had all kinds of gifts for family and they removed everything that was over the 3 oz rule. There were a lot of items under 3 oz but they yelled at her for them not being in a zip lock bag. Again she explained that she hadn't planned on this bag being a carryon so she wasn't prepared for the 3 oz and ziplock bag rules. They were going to throw away her gifts that were over 3 oz but she at least convinced them to bag the items and put my name on them so that I could come pick them up. So she rushes to the gate, checks her bag, gets on the plane and calls me to ask if I would please come to the airport to pick up her gifts that were confiscated. Of course I did. When she got to Puerto Rico for her connecting flight, they checked the bag no problem. She was pretty upset about the whole thing, understandably. It still doesn't make sense why they wouldn't check the bag when she had to check it at the gate so it went to the same place as the other checked bags but had to be subjected to the carryon rules. Crazy.