what I think about our lovely security-enforcing friends at the airport

You know, I don't really have a problem with TSA in general. You want to do the backscattering images? Fine. Whatever. I'll take my shoes off. You can run special tests on my baby's bottles. What bothers me is the inconsistency.

For example, many airports have both the metal detector machine and the backscattering machine. And in the Kansas City airport, you can choose which one you are going through by which line you get into. To me, that begs the question, why the junk is the backscattering machine even there? If you have something bad that could be viewed in that machine, but not in the X-ray machine, would you really choose the backscattering machine?

And let's say, for example, that you wear an insulin pump. Every other time you've flown, TSA agents have either told you that you need to put it through the X-ray machine or that you don't need to put it through the X-ray machine; and once, they rubbed it down with a special little pad and put that pad in their fancy chemical detector machine. That time, it came back negative (obviously, I'm not rolling around in weird chemicals.)

Except the last time I flew, coming back from Kansas City, after checking the baby's milk, the overeager TSA agent decided I needed to get the pump rubbed down and checked out in their little machine. It turns out that it came back positive. So then, 20 minutes before the flight, I got taken to the little back room and groped down because that checked out positive. In fact, it didn't even necessarily register positive, just "not negative." I don't know about anyone else, but I almost feel like the grope down in the little back room is more awkward than if they just did it there. Maybe not. I dunno. Then they patted down Natalie. Then they decided that, "oh hey, let's rummage through her purse too, even though it has already gone through the X-ray machine." Seriously? Oh and at this point, it's something like 7 minutes before my flight leaves and they've called my name twice for final boarding. Finally they let me go and I all out book it to the gate, and made it, barely.

One other fun factoid, when I flew to Kansas City from Salt Lake and went through security, the TSA agent who watched me walk through the X-ray machine commented on how my pump didn't set off the X-ray machine, and then let me go through. None of this "extra screening" business.

So here's my beef. I'm totally okay with the procedures in general, but for goodness sake do you need to pat down the baby? And go through my purse that went through the X-ray machine just fine? And different procedures about what I have to do with my pump depending on the airport and TSA agent that sees me? (That's the one that really annoys me. The other complaints are secondary to that.) And while I'm talking, do I really fit the profile of a terrorist as a young, white, cleancut woman with a little baby? Good one.