Good Ideas

The Transportation Security Administration gets maligned frequently for some of its sillier requirements, like requiring people to take off their shoes to shamble through security lines. But the agency also does some smart things, like this multi-airport pilot that lets folks bring up bar codes on their smart phones and scan them through at security checkpoints and boarding gates, rather than requiring them to print out paper tickets at home or at the airport. TSA is always going to be caught between competing security mandates and customer service imperatives, an extremely complicated set of opposing values to navigate. And it's even more complicated because TSA is one of the agencies that has a lot of contact with the public, and has that contact at a point when people are impatient, nervous about missing flights, etc. Under those circumstances, it's surprising to me that the agency manages as well as it does, and that more often than not, the TSA officers I deal with are helpful, respectful, and patient with me even when I'm not always feeling patient with them. Are there folks who are rude, deliberately slow, etc? Sure. But it's a huge organization with a very complicated mandate, and all in all, it's trying to move that mandate forward. I give them a lot of credit for that.