First Airport Experience with the Baby.

The family unit went to Nashville this weekend. During the trip, I discovered a new absurd layer of TSA, keeping the world safe for bureaucracy. Preparing to go through security at the Nashville airport, we’re introduced to a new level of farce that is the TSA screening process. We’ve checked our bags, wait to get to the front of the security line, with our liquids in Ziplocs*, like good patriots. We’re stopped by a security agent who asks who the baby is traveling with… Fiona stayed silent, and like a chump I gave up the ghost and said she was traveling with us. At that point, we’re told we have to go back to the ticket counter to verify the baby is traveling with us. We go back to the Northwest counter and the agent isn’t really sure what’s going on and then simply writes “infant” on my boarding pass. We go back through the line and everything is fine with our newly sanctioned and safe boarding pass. That was it. The special thing that we didn’t have was the word infant inscribed with a red flair pen. As we’re going through the security line, I hear another family with a baby stopped and the security guard reassured that family that we “had to do the same thing.” It’s a special day in America when a bureaucracy is justified by social proof. Save us all.

I can’t blame this on the TSA, but why is the recorded voice in the parking ramp at MSP airport that of a British woman?

*You can bring the liquids on board, as long as they’re in a Ziploc?!?