This was on the Fox News website today:

http://www.foxnews.com/travel/2012/0...mer-tsa-agent/

I can understand the monotony of the job but still doesn't explain why the TSA employs so many agents that have one voice: that barking voice that we all have come to despise.

edited to add: I see it was published on 5 March 2012. Not sure why it only appeared on Fox News today.

He brings up a valid point about the job being monotonous and taking a toll on you because you have to do the same thing over and over, but aren't many jobs like that? Ringing up people's groceries for hours at a time, for example, is just as repetitive and boring, and yet most stores don't seem to have trouble finding cheerful and polite people.

I agree with his point that they are just enforcing policies made by someone else. Many passengers seem to forget this.

I don't forget it. I just interpret their enforcement as ratification and agreement, so they are just as guilty as their policy-makers.

They aren't conscripts forced to do an odious duty because their family is being held hostage and will be killed if the required number of terroristic passengers aren't felt up. They are paid mercenaries in a war where they can't see the enemy so we innocents BECOME the face of the bad guys.

Many more understand that gratuitous rudeness, making up rules, and physical roughness are entirely up to the screener.

Yup, ringing up groceries or processing driver's licenses or cleaning bathrooms all day long may be boring, but the cashiers and clerks and janitors don't have to be (and IME generally aren't) rude in their limited interactions with me, they don't have to make up rules (cashier can page someone to find out the price of an unmarked item, etc), and the cashier doesn't slam my groceries in the bag and break my eggs nor does the clerk throw my license at me and the bathroom cleaner doesn't slam me in the back of the legs with the mop bucket.

And in all of these situations, as well as at the checkpoint, if co-workers and managers stand around and watch and say and do nothing, then they are indicating approval and support.

Someone posted in another thread that they'd witnessed a wounded vet getting mistreated at the checkpoint. I said they must be mistaken, because some of resident TSOs are not only ex-military themselves, they have posted that there are many TSOs who are ex- or retired military. Surely they would treat their own with respect.

Two of those resident TSOs are from SAT. I wonder if they were on duty watching (and laughing and doing nothing) the day that another poster witnessed a vet getting harassed at SAT.

+1

There's no policy requiring TSA clerks to be ignorant of what forms of ID are acceptable. There's no policy requiring clerks to fail to know that photography of the checkpoint is allowed. There's no policy requiring clerks to break colostomy bags or to open up and spill jars of cremated remains.

I was responding to the article (the subject of the thread) which says nothing about any of the things you mentioned.

Do you hold any agent acting on behalf of a principal to the same standard, or just TSA employees?

Whether the article mentions those things are not is irrelevant; what's relevant is that the routine occurrence of these and similar incidents proves that the clerk was lying when he said they are just enforcing policies made by others.

No, it doesn't prove that the clerk was "lying". The article is titled "Confessions of a Former TSA Agent". It is one person's view, not an analysis of the entire TSA. Perhaps this particular clerk knew the ID requirements, or perhaps he didn't come across any passengers with a Nexus card. He was sharing his experiences, and just because his experiences don't match yours, or those reported on this forum, doesn't mean he was "lying".

One of my first jobs (a common first job for those in the equestrian industry) was quite literally shovelling manure. I learned very quickly that if I had a job which was somewhat crappy, I could choose to make it more or less crappy. I chose to make it less crappy, and took great pride in shovelling my manure just so, and creating a very tidy muck heap.

I had several 'dirty' jobs since that time, as well as mindless ones, and ones which required that I deal with the public when they weren't always happy. But my philosophy of making the best of a bad job carried me through, and I see people like that every single day.

Maybe the job is a crappy job, maybe not. But as chollie says, just because the work is crappy doesn't mean that the worker has to be crappy.

If it's monotonous, then there's no need to involve human labor.

Why waste spending $20,000 a year or whatever those town criers makes when you can easily replace them with an mp3 stereo player sold at Walgreens for $9.99 playing a track on auto-loop of the usual diatribe?

An mp3 stereo can:

Say the phrase in multiple languages (English, Spanish, French, etc)
Can be set to auto-repeat
Can do the job 24/7
Doesn't give me an attitute
Tremendous taxpayer savings

Because it's about jobs, silly!

Any time I hear people who are criticized about their job performance complain about how hard their jobs are, I say,

"Having a difficult job is no excuse for doing your job badly."

If you are not capable of doing the job right, you shouldn't have the job. Difficulties are part of the job, especially monotony and dealing with irate customers, subs, or co-workers. If you can't deal with those difficulties in a calm, professional manner, you shouldn't have the job.

... then there's no need to involve human labor.


Au contraire. Remember, the bigger and creepier and more unpleasant TSA gets the more they can hide behind the "security" facade.
Never mind that 250,000,000 people have been groped, humiliated,
poked, prodded and otherwise mistreated; it's all about the image.
You couldn't project that with robots.