Pat down at SJU was less intrusive than expected
I flew out of San Juan two days ago and got chosen to go through the NoS by a female TSA agent directing traffic by the metal detector. I vehemently said "NOOOOO", so the woman told me to wait there and shouted "female" to some random other TSA person (I don't know whom, it might have been another person in charge of pat-downs). She then gave me the option to go off to a spot behind an x-ray machine or a private room. I chose to do it at the checkpoint, because by that time I was already waiting for this supposed extra screener to come pat me down.
After another short while, that same screener told me to walk over to that corner and stand on a mat and patted me down. No backup came. They wouldn't let me touch my bags, even though my camera and wallet were exposed and I was concerned about losing them. An older male TSA screener took my belongings off the x-ray belt and put them on a table behind me.
The actual pat down was not the sexual assault a lot of people claimed it to be. She talked me through where she was going to touch, and didn't press down anywhere except the pockets of my cargo pants (where she asked if I had anything in there). She quickly ran the back of her hand over my butt and never touched my nipples or crotch. Her hand went lightly over my cleavage, but I was wearing a tube top-like bra so I could have smuggled something in there and she wouldn't have caught it.
Also, I never went through a metal detector after being chosen and opting out of the NoS. The TSA lady claimed I was chosen at random, but I'm a female in my early 20s and sort of held up the line while I was trying to unzip my laptop case and push the bins of my shoes/wallet/jacket down to the x-ray machine at the same time.
The worst part of the whole ordeal was how they made me wait for the pat down when it was the person that directed me to the body scanner that did it in the first place. If the passenger doesn't care about being patted down in public, they should have done it right there and then send them down the x-ray line. The public pat downs shouldn't have to be in a separate corner. When I got patted down at LHR a couple years ago after setting off a metal detector, a screener was right there immediately after the machine beeped, and they felt more thoroughly while avoiding my private areas. (It felt like a massage.)
PS- I'm new here, although I've lurked a few times in the past.