Sometimes when I travel, the fun starts before I get to the plane. That was the case today. Because I fly often, I am TSA prechecked. This means I do not have to take my shoes off or take out the liquids and gels from my toiletries bag, but I still have to remove all metal objects from my person. I do not go through the full body scanner, but I do go through the metal detector.
As I approached the TSA precheck line that looked to be very short, a woman who was obviously in a hurry went whipping by me and the man in front of me to enter the line. She got to the security guard and had her boarding pass on her phone and her ID ready, but the boarding pass scanner wouldn’t read her phone. The guard moved it around trying to get it to read, but it wouldn’t.
He said to the woman, “I think you need to turn up the brightness on your phone so the scanner can read it.” He handed her the phone so she could adjust it and then waved the man in front of me forward to take care of him while she was adjusting her phone.
“This will only take a second,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am,” he replied.
As the man in front of me reached the guard, the woman said, “Here, I fixed it.” The guard took her phone, put it on the scanner, and it scanned on the first try. He looked at her ID and then let her through. The man in front of me turned and looked at me, rolling his eyes. I smiled and shrugged my shoulders as the woman jogged to the x-ray scanner belt to put her stuff on it. The man in front of me said hi to the security guard at the same time as the woman walked through the stand-up metal detector. It went off. The man in front of me was done, and it was my turn with the guard.
Meanwhile, the guard at the metal detector was saying to the woman, “Go back through and check your pockets. Are you wearing anything metal?”
“NO!” she said. Much like my three-year-old grandson when being told to pick up his toys.
I put my stuff on the belt. The stuff belonging to the man in front of me had already gone through the X-ray machine and now mine was on its way through. The woman went through the metal detector again, and it went off again. The security guard said, “Ma’am, go back and you will have to go through the full-body scanner.”
She said, “I hate that thing,” and thought for a second. Then her arms disappeared under her shirt. Three seconds later, out came what looked like a suit of armor. It looked like some type of heavy-duty under-wire bra for a knight. She put it in a bin, sent it through the X-ray machine, and walked through the metal detector. No buzz this time.
The man in front of me looked at me and said, “If I had known there was going to be a show, I would have brought refreshments.”
I said, “My wife is going to love this story.” After this start to my flight, everything else would seem uneventful.