Interesting and sometimes disconcerting observations on travel and security!
Tampa vs Colorado Springs Allergy Seasons
I’m back in Tampa (85 degrees and sunny and full of pollen) after a wonderful week-long trip to Colorado Springs (33-60 degrees, sun/clouds/snow, NO pollen yet). Stepped off the plane last night and wham! Allergies again! I may have to travel to avoid pollen season in different places?
Facial Recognition Errors
Despite facial recognition, my REAL ID doesn’t match my face in the TSA database. My REAL ID, retiree ID, and passport don’t have glasses on, but the last 4-5 times I’ve been through TSA, they’ve had several tries when taking my photo to get me to match and finally have asked me to remove my glasses. This time, after several tries, the guy called his supervisor and said, “She’s not in there!” When I told him that sometimes I’m told to remove my glasses (but never why), we tried that and it worked. Kinda makes me wonder how good facial recognition is.
Great Service from TSA
I’ve dealt with TSA employees 4 times in the last 5 months during a shutdown and no pay, and they’ve been truly easy-going, fast, helpful. One told me that during shutdowns, people take pity on them and are much nicer. Regardless, they were GREAT.
My Suitcase’s Last Flight Home
My beloved purple suitcase has made its last run and will be repurposed to store winter clothes. It got banged up pretty bad by my airline last trip. This time, the trolley handle they jammed broke. On its very last flight, I had to tie a rope around the handles and drag it behind me on 2 wheels–something I haven’t seen in 30+ years. You know, in the days when suitcases didn’t have wheels or trolley handles. Wow, what fantastic inventions I’ve not appreciated! Some people looked at me like I was crazy (or just pathetic) and others thought it was pretty innovative… and that dichotomy made me feel like I was working in rapid acquisition all over again.
“Talking Around Classified” or Just Sensitive Stuff
And maybe the most serious: The other thing I’ve noticed–and this is true of any place away from airplanes and airports but more noticeable when you are literally touching shoulders with a stranger–is how anonymous people think they are. Being in a place where you don’t know anyone is NOT the same as being alone.
I see this all the time from my home office. I live near a trendy restaurant, and several times a day, people pause in front of my house to have “private” conversations that I can hear from my desk OR they tell their deepest secrets over a phone call, all of which are captured on my security cams and many of which I hear while I’m working 10 feet away. I’ve joked about featuring them all on a TikTok channel and what money I could make. But that’s kinda mundane and somewhere between slightly annoying if they’re louder than they realize and somewhat entertaining if the secrets are juicy if they are on a quiet stretch of sidewalk.
But in airports full of people? Whew! People talk about highly personal or sensitive situations on a phone close enough that I can hear both sides of the conversation. There’s a particular company in Tampa that I’ll never do business with because of what I couldn’t help but overhear from 12 inches from my right ear for the 15 minutes before takeoff. I would happily have NOT overheard but she didn’t give me a choice.
Of note as well: the person on the other end of that private conversation had no idea she was having that conversation in public, let alone with at least 2 people within earshot of his half of the conversation and at least 20 overhearing her side of it.
But let’s get a little more serious about results outside of a couple of rude business people who think their customers are idiots.
There’s something about being a quiet woman over 50 that makes me invisible. Especially, I suppose, if I’m wearing my late mom’s favorite sweater and put my hair in a bun to be extra comfy on a crowded flight. If I’m cosplaying a grandma, I guess I don’t register as a concern and wouldn’t know what you’re talking about? Plus, it’s always amusing when you complain about not having any privacy these days.
The thing about both Tampa and Colorado Springs is that there’s a huge military presence and even though I’ve retired now, I know a lot of those people as well as their contractors and even the programs they work on. If you’re a contractor sitting next to me at an airport bar, talking to your coworker or on the phone about your meeting next week and with whom and then 5 minutes later, you mention a particular tech you’re working on, I may just know exactly who you’re meeting and maybe even the classification level of that meeting. No one paragraph of oral information is sensitive, as far as I know, but the whole conversation tells me a lot. At the very least, your overly loud conversation with a teammate tells me, our bartenders, and anyone within 20 feet that there’s an uptick of interest in particular solutions to a problem that’s obviously ramped up. But I was perfectly sober and had enough electronics in front of me that I could’ve had you on video the whole time and you would never have known.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve overheard names I know in restaurants and airports, but it was worse this trip. For example, while you probably figured that the grandma you shared an armrest with at our gate was merely attentively doomscrolling, I learned all about you, even though you never spoke a single word to me nor I to you. That you’re military, your personal situation, the type of work you do, which Government entity you work for, the locations of the other organizations you’re working with (which tells me exactly where you work and what your work is because I know what happens at those locations), your recruitment plans and challenges, how many vacancies you’re filling, what measures you’re taking to staff offices that are way understaffed for what you need or will need, actual names and positions… I left after 5 minutes to grab lunch at a bar and do a brain dump of what I’d heard–just in time to hear a couple of contractor types talk about their upcoming meetings. Who needs to follow pizza orders near the Pentagon when you’re chatting openly?
And then there was the very sweet guy in front of me on the plane who poured out his heart to a stranger next to him about the military, his current base, where he was born, his name, very private family stuff, his wife and baby, meetings he was travelling between. For over 2 hours. That was the part I heard before putting in my EarPlanes but they still didn’t block most of the conversation.
Maybe I’m triggered because I remember the days when we sat at a different gate at the airport until our flight was boarding so no one could guess where we were going or which defense contractor would be at the end of a flight to Seattle, St. Louis, Orlando, Tucson, Baltimore, Dallas, Minneapolis, or Los Angeles. Or maybe it’s the current state of affairs that has me sensitive to how people working in Defense overshare tidbits that show a bigger picture or put their families in danger. Or maybe because we assume a room full of strangers won’t know what we’re talking about, and never realize that those strangers might be purposely listening for that information or might recognize your work even if you don’t recognize them.
It reminds me of a conversation I had in a bathroom in NYC around 30 years ago at a writers’ conference. I was at a private dinner in an out-of-the-way location—4 people, including our new editor. This was the first time some of us had met her, and while the editor was paying the bill, the three of us authors dashed off to the bathroom. It was empty, cavernous, and echoing, and we authors had a “private” chat about what we thought about our new editor, which was all exceedingly positive. That chat lasted a good five minutes before we were suddenly silent and one of the toilets around the corner flushed. Our jaws dropped. We’d thought no one had heard, and immediately tried to remember what I’d said.
Out stepped a rather prominent literary agent I knew by sight. She told us that it was a good thing we hadn’t said anything bad. I’m pretty sure she would’ve sat there until she lost feeling in her lower extremities. She wasn’t there to spy on us, but she was garnering information about both the editor and about us, and it was the kind of thing that mattered. We’d thought we were safe in such an out-of-the-way location far from the publishing world. The lesson I took from that experience is that you never know who might be listening if you’re not clocking the people around you.
Well, that and to check better under the stall door if I’m going to have a private conversation about work. She could have ruined our publishing careers without us ever knowing she’d been there.
Privacy in public spaces is largely an illusion. What matters isn’t whether someone intends to listen—it’s whether someone can.
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