I'm on a Super 80, a standard issue domestic shuttle bus. There are five rows of Business Class, then the Coach section where I am seated in the first row. Normally a waitress closes a curtain between classes so as to hide the luxurious treatment that must obviously be going on beyond said visual obstruction. However, on this flight there is no curtain. And being fifteen feet from the lavatory with no curtain in sight, I opt to use the closer facilities midway through the flight instead of treking to the back of the plane. I expected to be stopped and scalded by a waitress for tainting the precious Business Class facilities with my lowly Coach presence, and indeed I was stopped, but that wasn't the excuse I got. She said, "We have a new policy that forbids passengers from leaving their seating cabin." Since I was a Coach passenger, I was not allowed to cross into Business Class. She tells me that it is a new security policy because tomorrow is September 11th.
I'm not sure what reaction she could have possibly been expecting of me, but mine was "So you don't want Coach passengers coming this close to the cockpit?" She responded with something about it being airline policy and she had nothing to do with it. She would let me use the closer lavatory this time, but I was not allowed to come back.
It being Septermber 10th hadn't crossed my mind when I left for the airport this morning. Nor did I think of it when waiting half an hour to get through the security checkpoint and having to show my ID and ticket four times. It didn't even cross my mind. All I was thinking was how much it sucks being treated like a suspected criminal just because I need to travel. Apparently the eleven-hundred dollar ticket to California doesn't come with a smile.
Any post of mine about airport security isn't complete without at least mentioning the phrase "illusion of security". There's nothing about a minimum wage employee checking that the name on your drivers license matches your boarding pass that makes you any safer. Nor does a security policy that I'm allowed to break "just this once". If a security policy is flexible, then it shouldn't exist.