[I wrote this last Friday, in the San Jose airport on the way up north; keep forgetting to post it.]<\/p>\n
Ah, yes, San Jose, most dangerous airport in existence.<\/p>\n
Or so it appears, given the extremely stringent security measures they have in place.<\/p>\n
Today the metal detector was going off for approximately 3\/4 of the people who went through it. I had removed my glasses (which has gotten me through without being searched the last four or so times I've flown), so the only<\/em> piece of metal anywhere on my body was my belt buckle. Oh, wait, that's not true; also my earring.<\/p>\n The guy ahead of me was wearing glasses and was carrying his wallet, which apparently turned out to have something magnetic in it. Perhaps a credit card.<\/p>\n We were lined up three deep to be searched. Every time they let someone through the metal detector, they stopped the line behind the metal detector for about 1-2 minutes until they finished searching someone and a space opened up at the end of the line (after the metal detector) to be searched.<\/p>\n They also had about three times as many security people on duty as usual.<\/p>\n After I finished being searched (by a guy who wanted me to hold my belt buckle away from my body so it wouldn't set off his handheld detector -- I finally said \"Would it help if I just removed my belt?\" and he said, \"Yes, if you'd like to do that, sir\"), I went to pick up my PowerBook. Of course they had to do some special checking of it too. (I have a theory that anything that sits at the end of the conveyor belt for more than a few seconds has to be searched. If I'm efficient and pick everything up, there's no problem; if I'm slow, someone invariably comes by and says \"Oh—we have to search that, sir.\")<\/p>\n So I let the woman take the computer to the explosive-sniffing table, and I put my shoes on and gathered my things. And I got to the table and she said \"Okay, now stand right there but don't put anything on the table while I do this.\"<\/p>\n Apparently she couldn't start checking the computer until I was standing across from her. Even as I was thinking what a stupid policy that was, I apologized for making her wait, and mentioned that I hadn't realized I was keeping her waiting. (I was sincere about that; I hate to do anything that slows the security process. These folks are just doing their jobs.) She smiled and said, \"Oh, it's all right, I know it's confusing your first time.\"<\/p>\n I neglected to point out to her that I've had my computer checked for explosives a couple dozen times (going back to well before 9\/11); it wouldn't have helped anything.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [I wrote this last Friday, in the San Jose airport on the way up north; keep forgetting to post it.]…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=642"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}