Airport security Part Eleventy-Three

I have ranted about airport security before. Those of you who know me in person will no doubt have heard repeated iterations of my complaints about the stringent measures we now have to deal with, presumably carefully designed to dehumanise, intimidate and irritate passengers. My doubts about the effectiveness of a process staffed by poorly-paid, under-trained, overworked people, which addresses only part of the risk to the physical security, at best. I suspect, in fact, it makes no practical difference to the risks of flying.

Today, though, I have a constructive suggestion, which would make me feel much safer. I'm willing to go out on a limb and say that it would make you feel safer too. Radical though this may be, how about the security staff spend less time making people throw away sealed bottles of water and coke, and less time groping random people who haven't even set off their insanely sensitive alarms, and more time looking at the x-ray screen that we have to put everything through which is supposed to show up Bad Things?

I know, revolutionary concept. Judging by the behaviour of the people on duty today, it'll never catch on - the woman who was supposed to be checking was turned round talking to her colleague and never even glanced at the screen as my stuff went through, nor the person after me. Just think of all the bottles of water and tubes of handcream I could have hidden in my bag.

But that would have been a security risk. We can't have that.