My TSA scan. Probably.

Recently, I had occasion to travel from northern California to San Diego for work and on the way back I booked a flight with a coworker. We’d gotten an early start back and drove together to San Diego International airport for the trip home, dropped the rental car and made our way into the airport. As we were heading toward security, I went through the usual drill of stashing my phone, wallet, belt, glasses and watch inside my carry-on, getting my laptop out and slipping my shoes off.

Now, you may not know this, but different airports have slightly different security rules about certain things than other airports. For example, at San Jose laptops had to be in their own bin, but iPads could stay in your bag. Also, my hair gel went through the scanner just fine in San Jose, but coming back in San Diego the TSA either didn’t like the look of it, or was having a bad hair day and needed some product so they stole mine.

As we went through security in San Diego, I wasn’t paying close attention to what the TSA was saying because I was busy getting undressed like like a first-time visitor to Whore Island. My coworker went first through the security scan, and then walked over to retrieve her bag. Next, I stepped into the the scanner that takes a 3D picture of your body under your clothes that everyone is paranoid about being leaked online, but that nobody on the Internet really wants to see anyway. After the scan as I stepped out, a large male agent stopped me by holding up his hand directly in front of my face.

Then, without the slightest hint of a smile he said, and I quote exactly, “Sir, the scanner has indicated that you may have a weapon in your crotch area.”

Time seemed to slow down and I got tunnel vision. First, I looked around to see if I had any witnesses to this extraordinary compliment. My coworker had already moved through and was out of earshot and unfortunately there was nobody directly behind me. It occurred to me to ask the agent to let me get my phone from the X-Ray machine belt and to ask him to repeat it while I recorded it. Then I realized that may be dangerous, since asking a TSA guard to repeat aloud that a security check indicated I might have a weapon in my pants may carry with it some implicit threat.

As I thought of all that, I sort of tuned out what he was saying because I was thinking about all the hilarious jokes I could use as he did the search, but I’m pretty sure he said he’d be using the backs of his hands to go over the front of my pants, up each leg as far as possible, and so on.

I spread my legs and put my fists on my hips like Superman, while he put on bright blue pair of nitrile gloves and started the pat down. I started to sweat, not for a psychologically appropriate reason, but because I was chewing off my tongue to prevent blurting out one of the numerous jokes I was thinking up:

• “My wife would disagree!”
• “You know, you should at least buy me dinner first…”
• “All this is completely understandable, I’ve been mistaken for a tripod on many occasions*.”

Then I thought about all the ways this little humor fest could go sideways resulting in my abject humiliation. I mean, what if he were required to yell, “Clear! It’s nothing at all,” or something else equally horrible?

And then he simply said, “Okay, you’re good to go,” and waved me through. Just like that. I didn’t know if I should be flattered, or rejected. I mean on some level I’d have appreciated some acknowledgement like maybe if he’d said, “Well, this makes sense now!”

I realized that it’s things like this that make people hate the TSA, and suddenly I knew how the 5:00am Sunday morning Walk-of-Shame feels for co-eds. I shuffled sadly over to collect my belongings as I held my sagging pants up with one hand. They’d stopped my bag in the X-Ray machine because I hadn’t removed my iPad, and after collecting that I made my way over to plop down next to my coworker so I could tell her everything that had happened.

Of course she laughed out loud and texted her husband, who immediately responded, “Happens to me all the time!”

Then I pulled out my phone and texted the whole thing to Rina so she could tell me she wasn’t surprised at all by this series of events, and hopefully she’d add that it was amazing to her that this hadn’t happened many times before.

All I got back however was:

Which considering I had just had an official federal government agency validate that I had a massive dong, seemed a bit restrained.

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*Never. Ever. Not even once.