YOU'VE BEEN SELECTED??

I’m not sure how it happened, but the two most nefarious teenagers, namely Connor and Severin, notwithstanding the fact that they had just spent six hours terrorizing passengers, chickens, small birds, and byways while waiting at the previous airport, miraculously procured TSA PRE-CHECK status at the airport in Puerto Rico.

Put that one down as one of the greatest mysteries of the universe, next to what happened to Amelia Earhart, who shot JFK, and where Jimmy Hoffa is buried.  None of these are as perplexing to me as the pressing matter of just how in the heck Severin and Connor got selected for TSA Pre-Check.

We arrived at the airport in Puerto Rico at the miserable hour of 4am hoping to beat the crowds.  This plan didn’t work.  At all. 

After hefting all our luggage through the US Agriculture inspection, minus our carry-ons, for some common-sense defying reason, we headed to the security checkpoint to find an epic Disneyland-like line.  A line without the promise of a thrilling ride mind you.  This line moved, or should I say, didn’t move, at a snail’s pace.  And snail pace would be a generous description given the fact that a snail actually moves.  From the end of the line we watched Severin and Connor bound gleefully to the vacant PRE-Check lane and within minutes they were both deemed satisfactorily innocuous without so much as removing their shoes or offending liquids.  It would be another hour and a half before we  would reunite with them.  We would spend the next 90 minutes in a cattle line up as we waited to be stripped of all our belts and shoes, pocket change, and any residual dignity, then argue with an official, and in Chloe’s case, submit to a less than massage-like pat-down. 

The way I see it, these boys were selected and picked out like a blind taste test with arbitrary results.  Not unlike the Mexican checkpoint I went through years ago where you were instructed to push a button which commenced green and red flashing lights until a few seconds later it arrives indiscriminately on one of the colors; red you get screened, green you do not.  It was mind boggling to know a tattoo riddled thug could push the button and fortuitously get a green light and go right on by the screening point, while a nun, if given the red, would be searched and inspected like a drug mule.

But somehow these boys both pulled the mother of all green lights and got the Pre-Check.  Did the airport not know this would leave them with two impish boys unattended by adults?  I was sure the antics at the last airport would have gotten them on some airport naughty list.  And yet they were free to roam, unescorted, while Chloe, not much different than a nun, had to submit to a pat-down.  To add insult to injury, once we made it through, we arrived to find two bored boys giving us the look like, ‘what took you so long?’

This arbitrary fortune is a unique way to keep our country safe--though I'm not sure reliable or effective--that said, our capricious boys sure didn’t seem to mind.