Was pulled aside at the Portland Maine airport because my purse had “too many clumping coins” (their words) in my COINpurse in the bottom of my regular purse. It was $4.67. The male screener demanded to know why so many coins? I told him my teen daughter and I had done laundry halfway thru our week long trip. He spent the next 10 mins. lecturing me on how to “properly pack” and then he swabbed the entire contents of my purse. At the time, I didn’t know that the female TSA screener at the nude-o-scan machine had told my 15-yr-old daughter she either had to go into the nude-o-scanner or be subjected to a thorough and invasive pat-down. My daughter had a maxi-pad in her pocket (need I explain further?) and the female screener demanded that my daughter hold up the maxi pad above her head in the machine, thoroughly embarrassing my teen daughter. The female screener never came to get me (the mother) and tell me any of this was going on (I was stuck in another area with the Coin Czar), and after the scanning, the female screener then went ahead and touched my daughter’s shoulders with the back of her hand, citing the excuse “we may have seen something on the monitor), um, yes, it’s called a bra and a tshirt, you moron. My daughter told me what happened, and I calmly approached the female screener and asked her why it’s necessary to look at he naked body of a teen girl on her period, and the screener practically screamed at me, “Because we CAN, that’s why”. I’ve written a complaint to the TSA and received a very canned reply of “sorry for your experience”. Okay, well, I Guess as long as it’s TSA screeners looking at a teen girls’ naked body and then touching her, that makes it all okay. They can all kiss off in my opinion. Give someone a badge and a $10 an hour job and they think they’re hot crap.
By: DebA