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Dropped yellow shirt, airplane ticket typo are not ways to start days of R&R

Subhead
For what it's worth
By
Rick Peterson, Tollefson Publishing General Manager

 
By 
Wow! The first official day of summer is still nearly two weeks away, and it has been a busy summer already.
With three class reunions and two weddings still on the calendar, mixed in with a couple of summer celebrations and a birthday or two, the weekends are full.
Before all summertime business gets underway, Mary and I got away for a couple of days. No big deal, just a couple of days for some R&R. No big deal — until we got to the airport to check in. There was no problem with my ticket, but for some reason there was no Mary Peterson on the passenger manifest. There was a Mary Petesron. Who would have thought flip-flopping the “r” and the “s” in our last name would be such a hassle.   
When the airline employee says, “Oh, this is going to be problematic,” she means it.
Maybe because our flight was out of Minneapolis and Peterson is a relatively common Minnesota name, “problematic” meant a couple of telephone calls, and the name snafu on the departure flight was resolved. The return flight on a different airline not so much.
I won’t get into the hours of hold time on the phone and the conversations with third world airline customer service representatives, but eventually we got the name corrected that took care of anymore ticket issues.
Getting through airport security is always a different story for me. This was just a short trip, so a carry-on bag was all I needed. I try to pack my bag so it’s airport security-friendly, but I rarely succeed.
I put my toiletry items in a plastic see-through baggy and pack that last. When I have to send my bag through the X-ray machine, all I have to do is pop it out of the bag and lay it on top and I should be good to go. — Again, not so much.
Because of my fake hips I have to go through a body-scanning machine, so I am temporarily separated from my bag. While my bag and I were going through separate scanning machines, one of my shirts fell out of my bag. Thank goodness it was a shirt and not a pair of my unmentionables because the security guy thought the best way to find the rightful owner of the yellow shirt was to hold it up and yell out, “Did anyone lose this yellow shirt?” My hand went up and all eyes were focused on me.
But, hey, I am all for airport security. If these minor inconvenience assure a safe flight, so be it. The thing that bothers me is that a simple typo took nearly four hours to fix, and when my bag and I were X-rayed, my clothes fell out of my bag — yet when I got home, the news was reporting that 97 percent of airport security checkpoints failed surprise testing. No doubt I was in the 3 percent category, and at the end of the day, I am glad I was.
 

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