Originally Posted by
seigex
IAH TSA is the worst that I've dealt with. I got yelled at in 2019 for having my laptop in my bag while going through precheck, me telling the TSA agent that it's a benefit of precheck to not have to take out my laptop (which was a pain in the ...) just made him visibly irritated. I ended up acquiescing, so I didn't miss my flight and was blown off by the complaint line telling me that agents have a right to change the rules as they see fit.
Originally Posted by
seigex
In this instance, this was one of those combined lines where i had the laminated paper saying I was precheck, the guy was just being an idiot, then stuck to his guns when I corrected him. I do love the addition of "unpredictable security measures" in that though. It's the perfect cover for incompetence.
Interesting -- my understanding was that in those combined lines, you typically get
"PreCheck-light", which applies to your
person (i.e., you go through the metal detector rather than the full body scanner, and keep on your shoes, jacket, etc.) but not to your
bags (i.e., you still have to take out your laptop). This is because the laminated paper stays with
you and you give it to the metal detector agent, but they don't have a way to associate PreCheck with your bag as it goes through the X-ray along with non-PreCheck bags.
So it would not surprise me to be asked to take my laptop out.
I did go through a combined checkpoint at PHL last year where they actually kept track of PreCheck versus non-PreCheck bags in the X-ray. I thought that was the exception rather than the rule, but I do see another
report (from 2020) that "the bag goes through with an identifier (often a brick) and thus no 3-1-1 or laptop silliness".
In any case, this could easily still vary by airport, and "PreCheck-light" was the norm in combined lines for years, so I'm not sure why you're so confident that IAH TSA was wrong in this case.