Please, Put Down The Mustard…

It seems my old boss found a bit of notoriety, while visiting the Quad Cities this past week. [Article Link]

Jeff Botkin was the manager who hired me at John Deere ten years ago. He moved to Denver about a year later, and went to work as a security manager at AT&T. He stopped by to visit us at the office, and we had a few beers during his trip to visit family in the area a week ago. On his way home, he decided to take two 8-ounce jars of the world-famous Boetje’s Mustard in his carry-on luggage. TSA screeners quickly sequestered him, and confiscated this “dangerous contraband”. I suppose it only makes sens, when you consider how dangerous mustard can be. If he perhaps found a way to get the mustard through the steel-reinforced door protecting the cockpit, and into the eyes of the pilot and co-pilot, they may have been very irritated and this may have lead to the luggage shifting in-flight.

Seriously, don’t we all see that whether it’s the faux security paraded about by TSA or the cover-your-ass responses that managers invent when responding to SOX audits, it is clear that people need to create and document “some” processes, regardless of their efficacy? During audits and reviews, the silly rules should be weeded out and caught, but they often aren’t. TSA rules are a perfect example of rules that are simply there to serve as window dressing. They are rules that may not agree with your common sense, but they give the impression that important people are doing a lot to protect you, and thus it instills some false sense of confidence in the general flying public, and in turn politicians get re-elected, and budgets get passed at the taxpayer’s expense, and very few of the rules actually do much to prevent terrorists from getting on planes. They mostly cause inconvenience and keep people from flying with nail clippers and mustard jars. The actual solution to keeping terrorists off planes is much more complex than you can fit on an airport placard, and usually they involve background checks and intelligence that is invisible to the public – an invisible solution is no good, they need SOMETHING to prop up so people know their hard-earned tax-dollars are going to good use – thus the STUPID, POINTLESS TSA rules that keep only the most inept and careless criminals off airplanes, and through their inconveniencing of us, the American travellers, they fulfil their purpose and allow us to fly from city to city, knowing that the guy next to us doesn’t have explosives in their shoes, or really spicy mustard in their backpack.

February 23rd, 2009 by