Come Fly the Unfriendly Skies

This is a bit of a misnomer of a title since my gripe here is with the airports and not the actual flying, but I liked the catchiness of it. My gripe of the day allowed me a good chuckle when I recently flew down to Greenville, SC for the US Pro championships. I flew from our local New Hampshire airport, which is pleasantly enjoyable because I can go from parking my car to my gate in about 12 minutes, without having to deal with massive lines. Upon arriving at the gate on this particular journey, I sat down with the Boston Globe - my most preferred newspaper, FYI - at a seat near the intense TSA security detail. I did a double take and then had to get my camera out when I saw the first person TSA decided to give the full security run-down to: an 85 year old man! The poor guy is so dang old, he can't barely raise his arms, much to the chagrin of the hard nosed security officer.
Uh oh, not the shoes! That's where he keeps the TNT! Gimme a break...

The next person to be searched was another elderly person, this time a woman. I took the first pictures of the elderly gentleman because I got a kick out of the situation and thought there was some entertaining novelty to it... I did not think this was going to be a continuing trend. Mind you, the airport is relatively empty and now the two consecutive people to get the full search (within a 5 minute period) are octogenarians! So not even five minutes later when yet another elderly person is getting harrassed... err, searched rather... I took another picture to see this (roughly) 70 year old woman getting the full treatment.

This poor soul was with a group of four other women her age who obviously had their plot foiled of bringing terror to airtravel. Oh, but be sure not to use the word Terrorism when going through TSA. A family member of mine recently made this mistake and was scolded by TSA for "frightening the other travelers." Wow. George Bush has clearly made this mistake himself going through security in the past, using the word "Terrorists." He was corrected of his mistake and soon afterwards his vocabular grew to include the go-to phrase: "Evil Doers."