I'm a TSA screener. I share your frustration about the shoes. In another thread, I mention that TSA needs to issue specific, detailed guidance about which shoes require secondary screening so we can avoid the broad interpretation that varies from airport to airport. Send your letter to the Federal Security Director, or FSD, of the airport. He (or she) is THE BOSS. Also mention how you didn't receive any responses from your other attempts. The FSD relies on them to respond to customer concerns and needs to know that it's not working. One recommendation, however: refer to "shoe policy." If you call it "shoe carnival," you're not helping your case and will most likely be dismissed, in a courteous and professional way, as just another whining passenger.

No. One pass is all that's required. However, in some instances, a screener may change the angle just to narrow down the source of the alarm. For example, if I pass the hand wand parallel to the floor in by the waist area as the passenger is holding his belt open, I can't always tell if the area alarmed or if I just re-alarmed the belt buckle. So I will turn the wand perpendicular and run it across to make sure I don't inadvertently re-alarm the belt buckle. What screeners are not supposed to do is pass the wand over until they finally get a beep. In all fairness to screeners, however, you also have to keep in mind what's going on around you. Sometimes a screener will hear the wand beep but not be sure if it was his wand that beeped or another wand being used by another screener hand-wanding someone else close by. Usually, you can tell by the different pitch. But every once in a while, we'll happen to inadvertently wand the same areas on our respective passengers at the same time. I avoid this by allowing whoever is adjacent to me get started first.

Wand beeps, there's metal in there somewhere. You just don't realize it. Zipper tabs, zippers, button snaps, metallic hooks, rivets, etc will alarm because the hand-wand is being passed closely to your body. The wand is not faulty when it alarms.

No. It is not proper. If you didn't alarm and the screener pats you down, then you should notify the supervisor. When you alarm, the screener should first ask you if you have anything in the area that could cause the alarm. Frequent instances are, for example, a piece of tinfoil, a penny, or other small item that the passenger is not aware sets off the hand wand that's inside a pants pocket. After the passenger removes the metal item, the screener re-wands the area. If it alarms again, then the screener will pat down the area.

General rule of thumb is this: before touching you, a screener must explain the need to pat you down.

There are exceptions, although it's usually not good practice to deviate from the written rule. Acceptable exceptions are, for instance, patting down the rivets on jeans located along the hips or waist. It's clear that whatever caused the alarm isn't something inside a pants pocket, so the screener automatically pats down the area where the rivets are located. Like I said, this isn't official TSA practice but screeners and passengers accept it. If a screener were to stop each and every time the wand beeped and go through the required explanations for a pat-down, the hand-wanding would take much longer. The other thing is, and this is common with frequent travelers, that they don't want the verbal explanations, they just want the screener to get on with it. "I fly all the time, you don't have to explain it to me. Let's go and just get this over with."

Yes. That's why they're called private screening. It means that for whatever reason, you prefer not to be screened in public. And that's okay. It's your right. However, to protect both you and the screener, a second screener is present as a witness.

Don't know what you mean by "done differently" other than location.