TSA was sorta 'frisky'....

I had to confess that I had never been 'adult' enough to get my own boarding pass and make my way through the process of being inspected from the inside out by the defenders of the air: TSA. Why are they all so grumpy? Is it in the job descripition? Do they have to practice their best 'cranky' face as part of the hiring process? Man - they are a bunch of sense-of-humor impaired people - always acting so stern and forbidding, hyper-serious and scowling at all the happy travelers.

I was pretty impressed with myself for deciphering the info. on the Delta site enough to print my boarding pass from home. And be ready to head towards the filtering-out line as soon as I got to the terminal. My driver obviously did not think I had enough sense to know how to get through the line, down into the bowels of Hartsfield-Jackson and back up on to the level I needed to be to get on the airplane. Just because I have never, not ever done it on my own before, and I would wake up on the middle of the night pondering just how the process works, and what the path is from the front door/check-in to the passage way onto the airplane is not reason to think I'm less than capable. Just because I have always been following someone else who was far more experienced, knowledgeable and flight worthy doesn't mean I can't stop and ask forty different people what to do next.

So I hoisted my bag over my shoulder, and my backpack on my back and got in the line for the TSA inspection. And thought to myself, as I usually do: 'this is the time when you should be wearing flip-flops', as everyone has to go through the machine shoeless with their footwear inching through the x-ray machine empty. Cleaned out all my pockets,dropped it all in the bin with my shoes, and processed my way through the line. When I came out of the big scanning machine, they asked me to step aside. I thought: uh-oh. The great big Amazon who pulled me over, said she was going to put her hands on my chest. I was pretty stunned, but knowing I didn't have any thing even remotely interesting in my shirt, I said ok. She asked if I had a chain on, and I pulled a tiny necklace with tiny-ier beads out of my shirt. She wanted to fondle me anyway, and I told her they had probably seen the underwires in my underwear. She did not smile, or smirk or find that in the least amusing. But after she put her hands on my 'chest', she let me pass on through.

I put on my shoes, gathered up my pocket misc. and was on my way. Only about twenty minutes early, so I got on without further incident. I had to call P. to get her to remind me what she called the longest, highest ever moving steps, when she was coming back from three months in India. It is unofficially The Escalator of Happiness.