San Gottardo

They are really funny. Even at normal times the progress at immigration feels like a combination of normal civil service laziness, IT failure, and a serious strike. Can’t imagine how things can even get slower than that.

But good to know this is the best airport in Europe (or isn’t it? It may have gotten its ranking the same way Qatar got the football world cup).

stimpy

I would say that Qatar learned from ADP (and perhaps Platini).

Goldorak

LOL Qatar vous aime serein !

maalloc

Surreal experience at CDG 2F PIF today.

Got to witness a verbal interaction between a pax and a PIF agent that almost got physical.
While I’ll make no assumption about what was said at first, the agent clearly had nothing to do at an airport setting, let alone having any kind of responsibility when it comes to security.

Shouting at a pax « Sa mère, viens on va dehors vas-y je te fume » (« Sir, let’s agree to disagree » for the non French speaking forum members) is clearly not acceptable.
I appreciate that recruitment threshold had to be lowered these days, but you know things are not OK when security agents behave the way you would expect from an Argenteuil street drug dealer. A shame.

The fact that the pax couldn’t even get the gentleman’s name to file a complaint makes it even worse.

bostontraveler

Sounds like they must have been training in the US recently.

matmatlr

I am definitely not surprised...
I saw several people arguing with PIF in the past and it, very often, escalated very quickly. Not that surprising when you see the profile of some PIF agents that believe they can do whatever they want and I'm pretty sure, without any direct consequences no matter their misconduct.

maalloc

Honestly, a security agent threatening a pax for physical retaliation falls into to the #onlyinfrance category in my opinion. I've never seen that in the worst hellholes (but truth is, I haven't been to the US for 10+ years so it might be different these days?).

Paris vous aime... "tu vas voir ta gueule a la récré", I guess!

matmatlr

Neither do I even if the US
I saw people yelling at each other recently in YUL & JFK but it has never been to the point where a security agent is "offering" to a pax a fight outside

bostontraveler

No need to fight at all. They just throw you in a cell.

maalloc

That sounds about right. With a 10-year immigration ban for good measure

San Gottardo

As shocked as I am (and you'll read the rest of this post to see) let me for a second bring up the fact that these days many passengers are just unbearable: a few know the drill, get their quickly on and off the belt, know whether their shoes will set off the alarm and take water bottles out of their bags. But many pax are just doing their own thing, start arguing with the agents, and so on. If you're an agent and for the 20th time a day some hyped-up influencer on her way to Ibiza tries to argue why she has to have the 200ml bottle of hair spray in her hand luggage, then agents start getting worn out, their patience wanes, etc. Some of them become short-fused and aren't open even to reasonable questions.

This is not to justify any verbal abuse of course, all I am pointing out is the tense situation at airports these days. And whilst we all recognise that the majority of security agents aren't personally equipped and/or trained in solving situations by reasoned exchange of fact-based arguments, they are human in becoming annoyed when passengers are just being stupid as well.

Which still does not justify what the OP overheard, whatever the start of the difference between the agent and the pax was (so it doesn't matter that we don't know).

Not just in France. Recent experience at Manchester as well. Some security agents on a power trip, making things randomly und unnecessarily tedious for one particular pax (taking off shoes when nobody else was, refusing as non-compliant his transparent cosmetics bag that even had an aline's logo on it), plus verbal abuse.And London Heathrow, not better.

Unlike the threatening security agent this does fall into the #onlyinfrance category. It's a "cultural" thing. In Scandinavia or Germany an agent (police person, security agent) would feel and be held individually responsible for his acts - he himself/she herself, as an individual person, is interacting with the "client". In France (and I suspect some other countries) the agent does not feel that it is him/her acting as an individual, but it's the "institution" (the police, ADP) acting and that the agent is not making individual choices, and cannot be held responsible. To someone used to the first culture where the individual is responsible the French hiding behind an institutional shield is shocking.What I have done about 10 years ago when I was dealing with a particularly unpleasant security agent at CDG that maxed out on the aggressiveness and stupidity scales: when he threatened to call the police I welcomed that and encouraged it - knowing full well that the police person would be a reasoned and calm professional listening to both the security agent before doing anything. And since I surpassed the ADP agent's ability to formulate a coherent sentence, the thing ended well and with the police person giving a little private sermon to the ADP agent when I walked away. So when an agent becomes too difficult, let them call the police (and let them do it - because they falsely believe that the police will side with them).

Been going through US airports a lot, and I have never heard of any case where a TSA agent threatened a traveler. Are they unfriendly? 20% are not and in fact funny and nice, the rest between unpleasantly grumpy and outright rude. Are they dumb as toast and lack any common sense? Again, 20% do not, which still leaves a lot of dead brains in uniforms. Do they play their little power plays based on the power that comes from their uniforms? Sure, many do. Wold they become verbally abusive with passengers? I think they know that is the line not to cross.

maalloc

Got to agree with you San Gottardo , since traffic picked up, everyone (and their influencer cousin) is back to airports, and SkyP lines. This morning, only Ulti ground staff saved me from half an hour wait time at « Acces n°1 ».

Authority figures abusing their power is a pet peeve of mine, though.
In this case, the agent was clearly punching out of his league which, according to the way he spoke, was probably not even high school.

FFs know to « smile and nod » and deal with the abuse.
While I am not fan of the random DYKWIA Business pax, I think no passenger, whatever his fare, should have to hear what was said then. Being physically threatened by someone in uniform should not happen outside of very specific circumstances. Pax was French so there was no cultural shock involved, but think about the image it could have shown to alien pax…

thierryd92

I am not surprised at all. ADP is forced to employed a quota of people living around CDG or ORY airports. This is part of their contract with the Goverment. existing employees and potential ones know this. So whatever their act, their whiling to work they are supposed to work, they know ADP can't really fire them as they will be replaced by people acting the same way.... This is why for example they don't care about Flying Blue status and are more than please to mix passengers at security

bodory

I am not aware of such government contract constraining ADP. Do you have a source?

To my knowledge, employers just hire whoever is available (and greenlighted by Prefecture). And given the limited benefits, they struggle like in many industries at the moment.

By the way, staff working at security (PIF) is hired by contractors of ADP, such as Securitas for instance. ADP itself does not have that many of its own people interacting with pax.

olivedel

I think this gives us a very good insight on why this institution is dysfunctional.