Originally Posted by Bart
At our airport, supervisors are free to ask for assistance from the other terminal. However, there are other factors to consider such as the anticipated flight load. Need to make sure that you don't shoot yourself in the foot by undermanning your checkpoint (or baggage pods) while trying to help someone else. The onus is on the busy supervisor to ask for help rather than the one who's not busy to arbitrarily send additional screeners. Mind-reading isn't one of the KSAs for supervisors.
Um....yeah.
I take your point that the supervisors need to ensure that every checkpoint is sufficiently manned and this makes it tricky to send a screener from one checkpoint to another.
I should make clear that the two security checkpoints in my story are surely less than 300 meters apart (my guess). So perhaps the supervisors at SFO could work out a way to "balance load" between the two checkpoints by just informing passengers at the busy checkpoint that there is an empty checkpoint just a short walk down the hall. To do this, I guess the supervisors of the checkpoints would need to agree to communicate with each other about whether their checkpoints are busy or not.