Checked in at zone K T1 on a Sunday night and got to security (expecting no queues - I know, how naive!) to find a queue stretching back to the guy who scans your boarding pass. From that position I could see that only one channel was open. It took 40 minutes to get through to airside. I was going to let it go as I was not at risk of missing my flight and did not desire an impromptu cavity search for complaining, but was surprised to find that the last security agent suggested (without prompting) that I go to the monitoring desk and tell them how long I'd been waiting. The two guys there thanked me for the info, asked if I was running late and then invited me to view their screens. One of them had a "reported queue time" based on some monitoring system they'd installed that said that the average queue time at that station was not 40 minutes, but 1 min 50 seconds. On that basis, and that basis alone, their requests to management for another station had been denied, even though they had shown me the CCTV feed of the queue I had just been in (which was even longer now) which clearly showed the opposite. The staff then pretty much begged me to report this on the BAA website as they were as peed off as I was, especially as they were taking the flack for this from passengers.

Anyway, to some semblance of a point (which was not intended to be a rant, honest...), why in the name of all that is holy do BAA rely on this cr@p technology instead of simply having a manager walk down and have a nosy? Not rocket science, surely!

(Alright, a bit of a rant...)