I bought a plane ticket for a friend via Orbitz. I mis-typed on letter in her last name and that resulted in a multi-week, multi-hour series of phone calls to correct the single letter (want to know why the U.S. economy isn’t growing? look no further than our obsession with correct paperwork that exceeds anything from 19th century Germany). During one of these interactions the agent asked, regarding a traveler named “Gloria,” if the gender was “still female.” I replied “Well, it is still two months before the flight so there is really no way to know.”
It got me thinking… if gender is not an inherent physical trait, does it make sense for airlines and/or TSA to be asking for a passenger’s gender?
They should ask for sexual orientation instead, since everyone seems to agree that is an innate immutable characteristic.
This is why it is called security theater. A minor misspelling has no effect on actual security (it’s easy enough for computers to figure out who you are based upon date of birth and approximate spelling – the post office can still deliver your mail even if you spell the address a little wrong) but by making a big deal of it they can appear to be interested in strict security. The airline gets an added bonus if you have to buy another last minute ticket because they won’t let you board with the misspelled one.
Meanwhile, somelike like Hillary can get away with all sorts of flagrant violations that would get the rest of us tossed in jail. These kind of double standards are why people are backing clowns like Trump – they figure nothing could be worse than what we have now. (They are wrong about that – things CAN go from bad to even worse.)
> … that resulted in a multi-week, multi-hour series of phone calls to correct the single letter
If you had to put a figure on that effort, based on your usual, or similar white collar work hourly rate, would it cover the cost of a new, doubly-checked spelling, ticket this time?
BTW. this is neither specifically American, nor so much security theater (it’s been around well before that started playing in the airports), as a travel/ ticketing agent-industry profit center. The airlines squeeze the percentages off their resellers by allowing them to make up via overcharging customers for “services” that do not cast a shadow over the nominal “main transport service” ticket prices.
Ian: This was an intercontinental ticket so if you add up my time plus whatever the Orbitz agents are likely being paid it would have been roughly the same cost to buy a second ticket.