Flight out was 0530. Left the hotel 0400, coworker and I dumped the rental car and headed to the terminal. Coworker had a stack of sport cones in the truck that didn't fit in his bag without repacking everything, he asked if I had room for them. Sure, shoved 'em in my helmet bag carryon since there was plenty of room in there. I'll drop them at the shop this week in time for your next class.
Got bag checked in ~0430. Security starts upstairs, line winds down the stairs, across the entire goddamn terminal, wraps around the end of the terminal by baggage claim, then doubled back about halfway down the line. At. 0430. In. The. Morning. WTF.
So I'm standing in line, waiting, barely moving... Clear dudes are walking around hawking their services. Dude behind me comments to the clear guy how me may not make the flight to denver... same one i'm on. Overheard another couple behind him commenting the same.
Finally get up to the security counter, i've got about 10min till takeoff. Figure I'd get through security and run to the gate, should still have enough time.
Do the TSA song and dance, xray dude pulls my helmet bag aside. WTF? Did I forget to dump my water bottle out? Did I leave a tube of sunscreen in there?
No.
The fucking sport cones.
Of all the things in my backpack to bitch about...
Pulls them out of the helmet bag, looks at them, flipped through them, like he'd never seen anything like it before. Minutes tick by... he takes them over to the explosives scanner, swabs them, runs that shit... still waiting... come on fuckheads, i've got a flight to catch... he talks to another dude and they look at the stack of cones... 15 minutes later he finally decides that orange plastic fucking cones aren't going to bring the goddamn airplane down...
...yeah, got to the gate and the flight was long gone.
Gate agent was great, got me moved/confirmed on the next flight out, 5 hours later. That flight went fine, picked up my bag in denver and headed home.
Today I get an email from Southwest about "Sorry your flight didn't go as planned, here's a $100 voucher for your troubles." So that was kinda nice.
Fuck TSA. Tub Stackers of America, Thousands Standing Around, Terminally Stupid Assholes...
