Val told me the news before she left for work, and made special sure to inform me not to bring any diet coke with me to work… *le sigh*
However, I was not prepared for what I saw when I got off the elevator on the 5th level of the Terminal…
First, I have to try to give you some sense of the SCALE of the place…
If you look north, you see this…
…and if you turn around and look south…this.
Now imagine a line of people that goes through the guideropes outside the (North) security checkpoint visible in the background of the first checkpoint (The people in white are the TSA, and the column in the background is an elevator that marks the (normal) entry to the Security Ropes Of Doom), and then extends out and around, and ALL THE WAY down to the South end of the Terminal.
The news reports today said that there were as many as 500 people in line at any given time… Uh…no…more like 2500-3000 would be my guess. (identical lines for both North and South checkpoints.)
Get to the office, and my two coworkers were knee deep in creating new security messages for all of the flight information kiosks around the airport, and the task of putting the same message on ALL of the ticket counters fell on my shoulders.
*4 hours* (and 288 individual edits) later, it was all done.
To the credit of the Travelling Public and the Airport Staff serving them, once “all the people who happened to already be packed and in the car when they heard the news” were through security, on their planes and on their way, the lines returned to normal with surprising efficiency.
It’s the day that all of us in Aviation Support dread – you can’t EVER plan for it, you can just do what you have to do to get through it when it comes, and I’d say that everyone handled it gracefully and efficiently. Val was even saying that it was only about 1 in 100 passenger that was griping… Most of them were quite grateful that the US now has the resources to handle a sudden and violent “change in direction” like that without too terribly much wrangling and hassle.
Now, my personal gripe is that the current defenses in place are going to be invalid within 72 hours…you should defend against the NEXT attack, not the last one…(i.e. making everyone take their shoes off at this point is COMPLETELY senseless, and soon, “No Liquids” will be, too.)
So, yeah…we should stand down soon…
Will we? I doubt it…but sensible people aren’t running the show…people who think about the PR aspect are.
Oh yeah, and I figured out how to read Flist and post while at work…occasionally. *glee*
I have so much sympathy for anyone who works at an airport right now. God, what a nightmare. I’m really, REALLY glad I don’t need to fly anywhere any time soon. *hugs to you*
Just quietly, you’ve got a bunch of clowns running your country, and we’ve got a bunch of clowns running ours. I am still furious that one of our citizens is facing an illegal trial in a certain Cuban prison camp, while my Government blithely smiles and does nothing.
Frankly I’ll be suitably grateful when both countries have someone with some brains at the controls. At the very least it might stop our Governments from giving their own citizens and allies an unreasonable time of it all.
But that’s just me.
I’m in complete agreeance. Thank the heavens that we had the sense to implement a 2 term limit (8 years in office) after Franklin Delano Roosevelt around 1950 (even though he was a good argument for *not* having term limits…)
Clowns
Unfortunately we are not so fortunate. With us a PM can do the job for as long as their party gets elected, and their party supports them. As it happens the job of Prime Minister has no existance according to our Constitution. In fact the only job mentioned in our Constitution is that of Governor-General, and that has almost no power. As I understand it the concept of the PM is something that we inherited from the UK along with the Westminster system of Government.
On the whole I am happy with a Parliamentary system of Government, but it gets a bit raw when you get a bunch of mindless jerls in whose lock women and children in detention camps, continually redefine where our borders are to stop asylum seekers from getting in, and who ignore any international law or treaty that is inconvienient to their agenda. And don’t even get me started on their dismanteling our worker protection system.
Still if pollies had any vision beyond next week, then they wouldn’t be pollies.