TSA did a strip search of my 97 year old mother-in-law, who needed a wheel chair to get around in the airport.
There are not enough insults, in enough languages, in enough countries on the planet to describe my feeling for TSA.
The TSA is just an allegedly "professionalized" version of the overreaction after 9/11.
Feb 2002. We're living overseas in the Middle East. My wife must have surgery. The #1 surgeon for this is in Bend, Oregon.
On the first leg out, after recovery, we have to fly a commuter turboprop to Portland. There's no gates or a bridge, just a little waiting room overlooking the ramp, and you walk out to the planes. Because we are tired of the hotel we arrive quite early. Good thing. More than two hours before flight time in marches a small troop of cadets. Moments later the PA announcement to line up for security. I have my back to the makeshift security entrance and ignore the announcement. Couple minutes later another announcement, followed by a third one that warns if one is not through security one will be denied boarding. Two hours before scheduled departure. In Bend, Oregon.
Seniors, of which there are many in Bend, trying to balance on one foot then the other as their shoeless soles are wanded. Grandmother's purses being completely emptied of their contents, and stirred around by a pimple-faced prep schooler. Young mothers being instructed to drink a portion of the contents of their infants baby bottle contents. What? They are going to poison the flight crew with baby formula? And after we are through this nonsense down comes a metal curtain to isolate the completely sterile waiting room from the rest of the terminal. No plane in sight, of course. It was probably just leaving Portland.
Not ten minutes later an elderly gent needs to use the bathroom. It's on the other side of the curtain. After much pleading the cadet finally relents. Coming back in poor fellow was subjected to a repeat performance with the strip down and wanding.
Ussama bin Laden couldn't find Bend, Oregon even if they had written the GPS coordinates on the inside cover of his Quran. The picture of the idiocy of officialdom on display that day has never left me.
Not as bad as your story Shepherd, but a pathetic foreshadowing of what was to come...