TSA is inconsistent? How could that be?

-trying very hard not to snicker-



In all seriousness, the Metal detector will alarm if you (or the TSA gate keeper) touch the sides of it while you walk though. That's why it might have alarmed only one of the times - your elbow brushed the side or the TSA gate keeper waved his arm into the WTMD to set it off on purpose.

Why would the TSA person set off the alarm on purpose you ask? The truth is that officially or not, some TSA people profile, like to inconvenience people, or simply like to harassss people and get off on some sort of power trip by sending them to secondary. I once caught a TSA Gate Keeper touching the side of the WTMD as he waved me though because I wasn't going to take my non-profile shoes off. Trust me, he and his supervisor were surprised that I knew they could do this.

The bag check is open to even more human guess work/error/judgement. There is always a chance that your bag was searched the last time because the TSA person watching the X-ray was being tested. The machines they use to X-ray your bags have the ability to digitally "insert" the image of a gun or bomb or knife onto the screen to make it look like you are carrying a weapon. The idea is to keep the screeners on their toes. The X-ray operator then calls for a bag check and in some cases the supervisor comes over and lets them know it was a test image (and they just passed) and sometimes they do the hand search anyway using some lame excuse like "I couldn't make out what this power cord was..."