“She didn’t apologize. She started laughing. I was on my hands and knees picking up bone fragments.”

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Actually, I think the TSA does a pretty good job at their security theater. (Calling it something like “security theater” does not automatically prove that such theater has no function.) I remember the old days when there were one or two hijacking of an airplane every single week. Hell, my friend Billy’s dad hijacked a plane!. And later when I was doing a lot of international travelling, when there were few hijackings but the security systems at airports were visibly flawed. So I appreciate that there have been improvements even if it may be not the way I would have done it.

Having said that, TSA agents can be real boneheads at times. The latest is a case of a man bringing his father through security. His father, as it happens, as in a jar in the form of cremains. The TSA agent ended up spilling about 25% of dad on the floor and laughing about it, supposedly.

“They opened up my bag, and I told them, ‘Please, be careful. These are my grandpa’s ashes,'” Gross told RTV6’s Norman Cox. “She picked up the jar. She opened it up.
“I was told later on that she had no right to even open it, that they could have used other devices, like an X-ray machine. So she opened it up. She used her finger and was sifting through it. And then she accidentally spilled it.”

Read the rest of the story here.

If those TSA agents could see the stuff I brought through airports before they showed up they’d freak. Human remains? Huh. Run of the mill.

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7 thoughts on ““She didn’t apologize. She started laughing. I was on my hands and knees picking up bone fragments.””

  1. You think maybe one day the TSA will be in the news and not be complete and total bumblers?

  2. How awful! I do hope she posts a follow up to let us know what corrective actions they took…if any…

  4. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, TSA, just doing the duty of protecting folk from evil – with whatever it takes – to do the job !!!!!

    Ya never will know what goes on in the evil minds of subversives – so, what ever it takes to protect the American Way – IS the American way of doing things !!!!!

    AND – the American Way IS the MOST Democratic Way of Leading a good, clean, wholesome life – so dig it – or DIE !!!!!

    But DIE – as a example TO Democracy !!!!

    Already dead – well – ashes to ashes, dust to dust !!!

  5. (Calling it something like “security theater” does not automatically prove that such theater has no function.)

    No. That would be fallacious. However, security theater is defined as meaningless, expensive, showy crap that really does nothing to increase security. (That is, you have it backwards.)

    If it actually increases security in a meaningful way, it isn’t security theater.

    The apparently debatable point would be whether the airport security arm of the TSA (or anything done in the name of combating terrorism after 2001) is security theater or not.

    It does have a function, though. Security theater is meant to allay the fears stoked by politicians and/or terrorists, feed bureaucracies and corporations, and increase the power of the military/police state we’ve been working on. (The end of the Cold War was such a bummer.)

  6. That’s all true but that is not what people say. People often use the term to refer to the whole visible operation regardless of effectiveness.

  7. That’s all true but that is not what people say. People often use the term to refer to the whole visible risible operation regardless of effectiveness.

    Fixed.

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