What makes me laugh in American Airports

06:26:2006
-laugh internally, of course. Best not to laugh in these peoples' faces.
San Francisco airport has a highly efficient humiliation machine that they call 'Security'. By this point I have realised it's no good getting upset by the process, or even mildly peeved. I just like to maintain a calm, detatched, Zen-like state as I drift through all the layers of nonsense like Alice working her way up the chessboard.

In San Francisco, security is staffed by angry looking middle aged Chinese women. You do not want to fuck with these people. I tend to question authority whenever I feel it is unwarranted or overbearing but there's something about an angry looking middle aged Chinese woman that commands my instant subservience. My ticket and passport snatched out of my hand and inspected, I was shoved towards the queue for the X-ray. Another queue, I noticed, led to the sniffer machine. These are relatively new devices about the size of a large phone box into which the passenger is prodded. The machine, officially called an 'Ionscan Sentinel' then puffs and sniffs the air all around the passenger trying to detect the scent of explosives and possibly dates, olives and falafel. That is what I surmised by seeing who had been selected for sniffing- exclusively Arabs. One security guy had to ask a young Arab man to explain to his headscarf-wearing elderly mother what the machine was going to do to her. She looked nervous.

The X-ray was straightforward enough. An incredibly stressed looking woman travelling alone with three children was ahead of me and was simultaneously trying to keep her kids together and stick 94kg of carry-on including a buggy into the grey plastic trays provided. Having travelled with three kids myself (though never alone) I wholly sympathised with her until she accused me of pushing ahead of her when all I was doing was reaching for a grey plastic tray. She didn't address me directly but via one of her kids, telling her that 'the man is trying to cut in line'. She later realised this wasn't the case and admitted she was wrong- also to the kid.

Anyway, part of the new money earmarked to protect the US from terror goes to pay the 'Shoe Man'. His job is to stand around the X-ray machine and shout to everyone that they must remove their shoes and have them X-ray'd as well. That's all he does all day, shout 'Take off your shoes!'

OK, my Zen-like state was starting to wear a bit thin at this point. It wasn't so much the X-raying of shoes but the fact that you weren't allowed to put them back on until you had walked across several metres of dirty airport carpet in your socks to the 'Shoe re-alignment Zone'. This may sound petty but I have a thing about being made to take off my shoes unless I am about to enter a holy place or a trampoline. So I put my shoes on as soon as they came out of the X-ray and noted with satisfaction that everyone behind me was doing the same. It was a small protest but I felt I had to make a stand somewhere.

The other thing that was funny, and this really does merit noting down, is when I had a few minutes to kill and decided to buy some wine from the area I had just visited. There was a pretty well stocked wine shop near the gate, and I asked the guy working there if they had any wines from the Santa Cruz region. He wasn't sure, so he got out a well thumbed reference book, the front and back covers of which had been covered in white paper. I discovered why when I saw the title of the book at the top of every page: It was 'Wine for Dummies'.

He looked up in the book which vineyards were situated in the region and then laboriously cross-checked it with the complete list of the stock. All this took at least ten minutes. He was checking the list so carefully despite a complete lack of knowledge about wine that I didn't have the heart to tell him to forget about it. They didn't have any wines from the region I asked so I thanked him for his time and joined the queue for magazines.

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