I feel your pain.

The way security is set up in TPA, it can go very wrong very quickly. I once barely made an AirTran flight for the same reason. By the time I got through security, the door was about to close. There was still a long line of people waiting to go through security and the plane was half empty, so I'm sure many people wound up missing the flight.

There needs to be a better way than having six different individual concourse security points that cannot do overflow for one-another. Heck, GSO built an addition for all the extra security lines that they don't need. (Almost all the gates on that side of the airport are empty. Three times in the past month - each time I've flown out of there - I've been the only person going through security. I think there are six scanners, but only one line is ever open.) TPA should do the same.