My wife and two children (7 and 11) happened to be leaving LAX on UA the other day and somehow ended up in some tiny security checkpoint in T7.

There were two conveyors for your crap, along with a metal detector thing and a nudiescope (sp?).

We put all our crap on one of the conveyors. As far as I could tell, nobody really told us to do anything at all. A TSA guy was on the other side of the metal detector and nodded at me, so I send the 7 year old through. The 11 year old followed a few seconds later.

Apparently this was a grievous error. TSA Woman #1 near the conveyors yelled out that they shouldn't have gone through there. Still another TSA lady sheepishly said she's not going to force the children back through the other scanner, and they left it at that.

The thread that my wife and I posed to the world still had to be dealt with via the body scanner, which had a bit of a lineup due to some moron fellow travelers incapable of following the most basic of instructions. I could see it would take a few moments, so I asked TSA Woman #1 if I should probably go through the metal detector to look after my children. She answered, well, what I put in the thread title. She also told the kids not to come back to us.

The kids actually did a decent job with our crap, but the 7 year old can be a little impulsive and could just as easily decided he needed to run off into the terminal. That would have been a major cluster&#$*

Sheer incompetence.