I’ve never had status with the airline - if any one of us would, it’d be my 15-year-old stepson who flies out to us every summer. Except that I’m not making an Alaska account for a teenager (if you even can?) It’s weird that I’m always the one that gets it, though.
And the last time this happened was last year, so I don’t think it was a beta test thing. They just randomly like frustrating me by giving me an option I can’t use, probably.
Weird. There are signs in Newark praising the pre-check. It really is BS. I’ll take pictures when I am there at 6pm for a 9pm flight – can’t take chances. Fuck you TSA.
In the same boat (plane?) here. I always out out of the scanner when traveling for personal reasons, but I swallow my pride and go through the damn things if it’s for work. so much stuff goes wrong with business travel – *cough*Delta*cough* – that I need every minute I can scrounge.
Since all my international travel is for business, I decided to pony up for Global Entry, and the domestic Pre-Check function was just gravy. Even so, the pre-check lines now are worse than anything I faced before the TSA took over security.
I don’t so much feel guilty for being well-of enough to waste money on it as I feel angry at being shaken down just to preserve basic human dignity.
I’m starting the think … maybe it’s the AIRPORT ITSELF that wants long lines. Or at least wants people to THINK there MIGHT be long lines. People who get to their gate at the appropriate time because the security wait time was accurately projected don’t have gobs of time on their hands to spend on food and drinks. If people think the line COULD be two hours long and get to the airport at 3pm for a 6pm flight, that only helps the vendors. Maybe I’m giving them too much credit.
I do that all the time. One of the main reasons I hate headlinese.
“Amazon Kindle Fire Engineers”… Wait, did [Amazon]'s [Kindle] project just fire all of their [engineers], or is the story about [engineers] of [Amazon]'s [Kindle Fire] product? Most headlines are a two-pass parsing operation, and even then some still require you to just read the second sentence of the article (the first always being some pointless lead-in, joke, or cryptic declaration).
Even if newspapers use the style to save ink and space, bits are essentially free. Why the hell aren’t we writing online headlines in plain “artilce-and-all” English?
Oh, I know, I know. But I still want an enormous, floating gin-palace with a biplane launching hook for ground trips.
It had a reason why I posted an image of Hindenburg’s interior and not only the iconic crash photo : )
Of course all this is simply a symptom of “the terrorists have won” - the TSA just doesn’t realise they are Al Qaeda’s enforcers
In other news - I travel with an APEC business card - this is essentially a business visa for Pacific Rim nations - acceeted almost everywhere, but the US, which is only a junior member of APEC, while it doesn’t get me into the country it does get me into the crew line at SFO and LAX which is enough of a boon
If only we could truncate TSA security lines.
One reason is RSS feeds – RSS will truncate “Title” text, different readers truncate at different, arbitrary lengths. Google News used to truncate headlines to 37 characters (and 3 dots, for 40 total).
The TSA uses a private contractor at SFO, which might have something to do with it. (I’m not on the “government is inherently incompetent” train but in the TSA’s case, all aboard.)
The hell of it is, I see plenty of people who have a problem with this, and yet somehow they still keep voting for democrats* and republicans, so they are really bringing it upon themselves (and unfortunately, upon the rest of us poor fellow travelers upon this planet who are afflicted by fools like them.)
*I don’t mean good democrats like Wyden and Warren, of course, I’m talking about the ones like Feinstein and Cuomo who make up the huge majority of democrats in public office.
A PSA for my fellow BB folks. Let’s keep this between us. If you fly out of Newark Liberty Terminal C don’t use the “Premier” checkpoint of you are premier status. Just use one of the others as if you are not premier status. Here’s why: first off everyone seems to be premiere status. It’s more than 1/3 of travelers I am guessing which means this checkpoint is getting more than its share of travelers. On top of that I think they often operate with fewer porno scanners than the other two checkpoints. And lastly it seems all traveling in wheelchairs or with people in wheelchairs is directed to this checkpoint. It was a non-stop-steady stream of wheelchairs “jumping ahead” of the other line for people not with wheelchairs. So don’t use this special like. It’s not special.
We flew four times to Japan and once to Australia in 2015, and thought about buying into the precheck program. I’m so glad we didn’t, because in only one case did we see a precheck line that was open, on a connecting flight through Canada.
