After all the trouble Transportation Security Administration (TSA) workers put you through at an airport, how would you feel if they then made you the butt of a prank or joke? That's just what happened to a student at the Philadelphia airport.
Rebecca Solomon is a 22 year-old student who was returning to the University of Michigan on January 5th. As her bags were being screened at the airport, a TSA worker suddenly pulled a plastic bag of white powder out of the case holding her laptop computer. He demanded to know where she had gotten it.
The girl was horrified. Had a terrorist slipped some kind of explosive into her luggage? Had a smuggler slipped some drugs into her bags? She stammered for an explanation she did not have. Solomon later wrote in her student newspaper, "He let me stutter through an explanation for the longest minute of my life. Tears streamed down my face as I pleaded with him to understand that I'd never seen this baggie before."
Then the TSA worker smiled and said it was his. Solomon said he "waved the baggie at me and told me he was kidding, that I should've seen the look on my face. I had been terrified and disrespected by an airport employee. He'd joked about the least funny thing in air travel."
She's right. If she had been the one pulling the "prank", she would have been arrested and very possibly served significant jail time. But he thought it was really funny when he did it. Well, it wasn't funny. Ms. Solomon did the appropriate thing. She demanded to see a supervisor and filed an official complaint.
At least the TSA seems to have acted in an appropriate manner. TSA spokeswoman Ann Davis would not say whether the worker quit or was fired, but did say he no longer worked for the TSA. She went on to say, "TSA viewed this behavior to be completely inappropriate and unprofessional. The employee was immediately disciplined by TSA management at the Philadelphia airport."
That was the least they could do.
I totally agree with you, Ted. Especially about the fact that the passenger would have been seriously busted if she had pulled something like that on the TSA worker.
ReplyDeleteMaybe it's shows like MTV's "Punk'd" that leave some people with the impression that it's perfectly all right to pull a prank on someone in an otherwise serious situation.
But on the other hand, it seems to me that jerks like this have always been around. I remember in college, I had a friend of mine who volunteered to work on a crisis hotline. One night, he got a phone call from someone who started out by saying, "I'm really depressed." The caller strung my friend along for an inordinate amount of time, along to finally end up laughing and hanging up.
A few days later, my friend passed another volunteer on the crisis line going to class. The other volunteer said, "Oh wow, man. I'm really depressed" and then burst out laughing.
People who work with the public in positions of responsibility (even volunteers) should be very carefully screened, and if idiots like these two happen to sneak through the screening process and show themselves for what they really are, they should be terminated immediately.