Originally Posted by
cbn42
He brings up a valid point about the job being monotonous and taking a toll on you because you have to do the same thing over and over, but aren't many jobs like that? Ringing up people's groceries for hours at a time, for example, is just as repetitive and boring, and yet most stores don't seem to have trouble finding cheerful and polite people.
I agree with his point that they are just enforcing policies made by someone else. Many passengers seem to forget this.
Many more understand that gratuitous rudeness, making up rules, and physical roughness are
entirely up to the screener.
Yup, ringing up groceries or processing driver's licenses or cleaning bathrooms all day long may be boring, but the cashiers and clerks and janitors don't have to be (and IME generally aren't) rude in their limited interactions with me, they don't have to make up rules (cashier can page someone to find out the price of an unmarked item, etc), and the cashier doesn't slam my groceries in the bag and break my eggs nor does the clerk throw my license at me and the bathroom cleaner doesn't slam me in the back of the legs with the mop bucket.
And in all of these situations, as well as at the checkpoint, if co-workers and managers stand around and watch and say and do nothing, then they are indicating approval and support.
Someone posted in another thread that they'd witnessed a wounded vet getting mistreated at the checkpoint. I said they must be mistaken, because some of resident TSOs are not only ex-military themselves, they have posted that there are
many TSOs who are ex- or retired military. Surely they would treat their own with respect.
Two of those resident TSOs are from SAT. I wonder if they were on duty watching (and laughing and doing nothing) the day that another poster witnessed a vet getting harassed at SAT.