Its not obedience, its mall-cop mentality. Everybody likes to think their job is important. These guys think that each time they stop someone from entering the country they are a hero.
Pumpkin Pol Pot reinforced their self-image of being the last, best hope to defend their country. CBP morale is sky high since the election. Finally, someone who gets how important it is to harass and antagonize foreigners!!
Also, asking him questions they don’t understand for him to give answers they won’t understand in order to comply with vague, possibly even non-existing regulation. Definitely Kafkaesque.
THIS! Thanks for reminding me to rewatch Brazil.
This should also be included in the broken job interview process in favor of whiteboarding exercises.
Ditto. I think I learned that in college and it’s never come up again.
Perhaps some sort of distinctive patch or armband?
I agree with your Kafka analysis, but in my scenario, additionally, the officials are high as kites, they are enjoying this social, lubricated experience that they are the arbiters of, it is hypernormalised, authoritarian and using what corners of the internet they inhabit to pick out carefully curated information that enforces their implicit hatred of those with whom they are at political war. With whom they have always been at war. 
Exactly. Give me your unsorted, your heaps, your unbalanced binary trees yearning to realloc free space.
Maybe it will be, if Trump realises that he should have asked for a picture of his recent business partner balancing a red herring on his head instead of transferring his tax returns to Nigeria.
There’s probably some kind of clever retort involving the prevalence of 419 scams, those probably being one of the first things someone would be likely to associate with Nigeria these days – but I can’t think of what form such a retort would take that would not make the situation worse.
Just Google it, and then weed through the dozens of almost-correct StackOverflow answers.
My guess is that this doesn’t come up all that often.
I had this once with a border guard that threatened to not let me back into the US (on a L-1 visa) if I couldn’t justify to them why I should be allowed in. She was trying to grill my on my technical qualifications, wanted to know why an American couldn’t do my job.
I’d only left the country because the date on my visa waiver form was running out so I needed to get a new one, I’d been to Canada for an hour or so - I’d been living in the US on the visa for >2 years at the time, but the border guard can deny you reentry at any time and it’s basically at their discretion.
Is it that different from when untrained HR people try to act as technical gatekeepers in the hiring process?
How ironic that the Customs officers didn’t even know enough to know what questions to ask someone with Omin’s education and expertise.
“Wait, wait, wait. This blackfella says he’s a computer guy? You’re shittin me. Well, this I gotta see.”
Who told these nitwits that this was their job, to devise supersmart tests for everyone “suspicious” who comes through the door?
CBP: (typing) What do you do when you don’t know if someone really works for a company?
Google: See if the company can vouch for them.
CBP: Oh, yeah…
ETA I forgot to say what the fucking fuck is this fuckery?
This gives a whole new meaning to Captchas…
Given the present circumstances and timing, I’d say let’s keep it simple:
Orwellian + Kafkaesque + Huxleyan = Trumpian.
