This past weekend at GSO we were extremely short-handed. I worked a double shift on the checkpoint this weekend. Saturday morning we started with 10 people to man the checkpoint. There are 5 people to a lane and that's one lane being a selectee lane, which also meant for lunches one lane would only be operating. With college fall break and the holiday weekend we seen triple the traffic. Normally a saturday is light. With about 1000 people for the day. We processed about 4 or 5 times that. When second shift arrived, they only had 7 people I made 8. No one from AM could stay over so that meant we didn't have enough people to run 2 lanes. We were stuck with only one lane and a boatload of passengers who were not too happy. This is only our south checkpoint too (Where delta, usair, united and american fly out of), our north checkpoint only had 5 on both shifts (where continental, northwest and airtran fly out). Yes we may have a small airport, but we do get busy. I don't understand why there is a misconception of smaller airports, maybe we don't process 10's of thousands of people a day, but, we don't have those 1500+ crews either. We have about 100 screeners total to man the checkpoints and baggage screening stations. There are 7 teams of screeners to vary days off and such, and like 3 or 4 to a team, some teams only have 2. so when 2 teams may be off, we can be extremely short. I guess I just wanted to vent because I was yelled at quite a bit this weekend. I think I only verbally bashed maybe 2 or 3 people both days. Yesterday was even worse, we only had 9 people on AM and 6 on PM for the checkpoint. If you're going to say why not send some baggage people to the checkpoint to help out? We can't....they aren't certified to man the checkpoint yet. Only baggage. We're working on crosstraining everyone. My biggest complaint though is that yesterday evening they announced in our de-briefing that they are cutting out overtime. How retarded is that. We can barely run the checkpoints with the people we have and now you just want to make it worse. OMG, what are they thinking? As far as verbally bashing passengers, There were those few occasions where someone came through late for their flight and blamed it on us. Yes it is partially our fault, but don't shoot the messenger. I try to tell people that often. Why don't passengers understand that if they were just calm and relaxed it would be so much easier to process them. Instead they get frustrated from the wait, they don't pay attention to what we are saying and they might end up alarming because they were in a hurry and didn't take anything off, like watches, coins, shoes...whatever. Then they don't want to cooperate when we have to wand them or search a bag. One inparticular incident involved a disgruntled gentleman who was running late for a flight and not only did he beep coming through but he had a hatchet is in carry-on bag. So the xray person called a bag check, I took his bag while another screener wanded him and as I was the acting-supervisor for the moment I had to break the bad news that he couldn't carry the hatchet on board with him.....and he asked why not? So we went back and forth for a moment as I tried to explain his options, he didn't want to hear it and became irate tried to pull his bag away from me, and when I told him he couldn't have his bag back yet, he threatened that if he missed his flight or if I gave him the chance to get in his bag he was more than prepared to take my life with his "GOD D@mn" Hatchet as he put it so nicely. So as passenger were walking through the checkpoint watching this man several had stopped to watch the comedic performance he had displayed for them. I told him from the get go if he would have been clam and patient he would be on the plane by now. Once he threatened my life, he jerked his bag away and pushed me to the side and fearing he was about to attack me, I subdued him until officers arrived. I probably should have let him go down to the gate and call the airline and tell them he could not board and it would have been handled nicely, but at the moment I was actually 99% sure he was gonna take out his hatchet and do some damage. I decided yesterday it was time to take a small vacation so I put in for 2 days off and now I'm chilling at home watching some movies and talking to you guys. What an interesting weekend....Don't you think?