Airport screening woes @ NAIA Terminal 3: My flip-flops' a threat!

hands up, shoes off!

This Yahoo buzz article caught my eye... a teenage boy's harmless religious garb was mistaken by a fellow passenger for a bomb causing the plane he's on to be diverted. It somehow encapsulates everything that's changed in the way we and the authorities behave in airports around the world since the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

mighty difficult to put sneakers back on

Times really have changed. Gone are the days when we could just zip through airport security with our shoes on and perfumes/shampoos safely in our purses. When I was little, we were even allowed to see off departing passengers at Naga Airport up to the time they board the plane with only a glass window in between (that changed in 1998 when a government official was assassinated there right in front of me--shattering my eardrum, but that's another story).

...whatever

On to my airport screening tale... I took a flight recently and remembering how I had to take off my shoes before being allowed to go through the metal detectors at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) Terminal 3, I thought it would be best this time to wear my "tsinelas" (flip-flops). Surely I would just be waved through after putting my hand-carried purse and laptop on the X-ray machines, right? Wrong. The lady in charge of frisking passengers at the metal detector thingy, still insisted I took my flip-flops off and have it pass through the X-rays.

potential "terrorists", all

I know some stupid terrorist tried to blow up a plane--with a bomb hidden in his sneakers a few years back. I certainly understand why this has become necessary... but what the heck kind of weapon could I hide on my flip-flops? There might be gum underneath it but I could vouch for its "innocence". I just had to ask that to the metal detector lady and she told me "marami" (a lot). When I asked her to name one example how a flip-flop could be used as a terorist tool, she just glared at me.

put your shoes back on now, girl

I didn't mean to give the lady a hard time, her job must get tedious at times--dealing with thousands of passengers impatient to get to their destinations... sometimes with questions she doesn't want to answer or she's answered a million times already. But it is just really annoying that the terrorists' have succeeded to scare us so completely that common sense sometimes takes a backseat. We had to follow these new rules and everyone's treated as a suspect.

innocent: the offending tsinelas

Picking up my flip-flops after its X-rayed, I hang around for a while and observed the people going through airport screening... little kids, teenagers, grandparents, moms... everybody had to take off their footwear. A few weeks ago another stupid loser terrorist tried to bomb a passenger jet using explosives hidden in his underwear. I'm glad he was stopped before anything happened... but I shudder to think what kind of screening will result out of that.

haha