Incredibly long airport security lines are ‘unexplainable contradictions’
May 18, 2016, 5:27 AM | Updated: 10:02 am
"I always tell people I won't apologize for doing our job well, but I do apologize to the people who found themselves stranded in Chicago..." TSA Administrator Peter Neffenger said. (AP)
(AP)
Over the weekend, the TSA security lines at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport took up to three hours. It was bad enough that the head of the TSA actually apologized – sort of.
“I always tell people I won’t apologize for doing our job well, but I do apologize to the people who found themselves stranded in Chicago…” TSA Administrator Peter Neffenger said.
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The airport looked like a Red Cross shelter. Senator Dick Durbin blamed the airlines. He said if airlines suspended baggage fees through the summer travel season more people would check their bags.
But last year the airlines made $3.8 billion on baggage fees. No company in its right mind sets fire to $3.8 billion.
No, this is one of those unexplainable contradictions of the information age, because in your pocket is a smartphone roughly 120 million times as powerful as the computer that put men on the moon. And it connects to an airline computer that has your ticket information, and therefore has known for weeks if not months that you were coming!
This means the airport should know weeks if not MONTHS in advance EXACTLY how many people are going to show up, what gate they have to get to, and therefore, how many TSA agents need to be there.
It makes no sense. We have phones that could land 120,000,000 men on the moon simultaneously, and yet we still miss the flight to Cleveland.
But at least we use the phones for something else: taking to social media to use a hashtag (#IhatetheWait).
The problem is NOT that America is headed in the WRONG direction. It’s that there are days we can’t head in ANY direction.
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