I know this blog is about photography but I’ve got an exception this post.

I’m traveling this week and had a chilling TSA experience at the airport. I was going through the standard check in process. I went to the kiosk and swiped my credit card to get my boarding pass and receipt. The kiosk went “kerchunk – kerchunk” and I reached down to get the pass and receipt and found nothing. The bin was empty. Luckily the airline representative was standing there and saw it all happen. He gave the kiosk a smack and still nothing. So he reached up inside, lifted it up a little, and yanked. Out came the sheets. Cool! I thanked him and headed to the security line. Again, it was pretty much the standard routine. I handed the TSA agent the boarding pass and my driver license. He laid the license on top of the boarding pass and he shined a special top secret flash light at my license. He held it up, looked it over, and marked something in an encrypted handwriting apparently developed by the NSA because it didn’t look like any language I’ve ever seen. He handed it all back to me and I was off to the metal detector. After I made it through the metal detector where they looked again at my boarding pass and ID, I put on my shoes, and repacked my laptop I was off to the gate.

Once I made it to the gate I figured I better see what seat I was assigned. That’s when it happened – what I saw blew me away! The name on boarding pass was not even close to mine. I have no idea how I got through the gate with this boarding pass. Even worse, no doubt someone else was using my boarding pass! I went to the airline desk at the gate and told them what happened. The two employees working at the gate looked at each other with something of a disgusted but we need make the customer feel comfortable expression. They printed me a new pass, apologized pointed me to the gate. I express my concern about the fact I made it through the gate without even a question. It seems to me that going through the gate with the wrong boarding pass would get you a free body cavity search in a back room by thick fingered thugs with dark sunglasses under a spotlight.

When I got to my destination I when online to the TSA.gov website and gave them feed back. I told them the story and asked for feed back. I’m interested to see what they say.

I’ve gotta tell you that the entire experience left a bad taste in my mouth. I was under the impression that improvements had been made in airport security – now I’m not so sure. When or if I get a response back from the TSA I’ll let you know what they have to say.

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