A week or so ago, Mandi Hamlin was stopped in an airport security line and was forced to remove her metal nipple rings.
A Texas woman who said she was forced to remove a nipple ring with pliers in order to board an airplane called Thursday for an apology by federal security agents and a civil rights investigation.She got all hot and bothered because of it and everyone was thrown into a tizzy. Give me a break. This is exactly the kind of reaction she wanted in the first place. Nobody gets nipple rings because they want to blend in - it's an act of exhibitionism. "Look at me, everyone! I have nipple rings! I've got attitude and rules don't apply to me!"
Geeze, Mandi, if you want your boobs to be the center of attention, you need to take the good with the bad. It reminds me of the old Onion story about the woman who got breast implants who wanted men to stop staring at her chest. So Mandi got pulled over by the TSA and they made her remove the rings. Thanks a lot, Mandi. All the people in line are really happy with you. I'm sure the TSA agents who were trying to figure out what to do were glad to see you as well. You must have really made their day. Now their actions are being examined by everyone just so you can run around with nipple piercings.
No, Mandi, that's not an immature act of self-promotion, not at all. And believe you me, none of us think you're a dimwitted, narcissistic skank. Nope. No way.
So now a bunch of low-paid TSA employees have to answer a lot of questions and a bunch of travellers had to wait in line a while longer, all so Mandi could cop an attitude and show the world she wasn't some 1950s June Cleaver. She lives by her own rules, baby. She's a rebel. Until that childish act of rebellion has a price and then she's running off to the authorities to complain. Yep, Mandi, you're a real voice for personal freedom. Thanks.
Jeanne Bliss (perhaps wearing an MGB cylinder head stud through the back of her neck, perhaps not) uses this as a customer service lesson for TSA and takes those folks to task. Apparently, copping an attitude has now become subject to bureaucratic review.
3 comments:
KT,
Love this post. What I wonder about this whole thing is... I understand that TSA need to investigate and "resolve" the alarm. To do otherwise would have been to make a mockery of the whole screening process (yes, even worse than it normally is). But why wouldn't a female TSA agent checking that she did indeed have nipple rings, and that a wand went off at those locations have been sufficent? Requiring her to remove the rings seems insane.
Even with all that, if they followed procedure, then "Mandi", you need to build a bridge and get over it. Nothing in life is perfect. You are not the center of the universe. If you insist on having a special outlook on life, and being "different", don't be surprised when you get treated "different"ly.
My problem with the whole TSA thing is that the whole thing is built on the twin premises that:
(1) You, The Air Passenger, Are Considered A Terrorist Until You Prove You Are Not; and
(2) If You Aren't Terrorists, You Are All Helpless Sheep Who Can't Fend Off Some Maniac With A Pair of Pinking Shears, So We Have To Take Care Of You.
Whatever happened to "Innocent until proven guilty"? And it's already been proven several times that passengers who know what the stakes are, are quite capable of subduing hijackers. So what's the point of the TSA inconveniencing millions of people per day so they can confiscate their cigarette lighters and knitting needles? Or, in this case, nipple rings. Unless she had some monstrous hoops the size of pot lids, I fail to see the benefit of setting metal detecors so that they trigger on something that small.
Tim, the TSA isn't pulling it's airport security checkers from the graduates of USC. Eventually, someone like this was going to run into a security guard sufficiently unsure of what they were supposed to do in weird cases like this one.
Mandi needs to deal with it. She rolled the dice and they came up snake eyes. In any case, she's the one who chose to go through the security line with metal objects piercing her body.
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