The View from 30,000 Feet

The View from 30,000 Feet

I’m writing this on Wednesday at 33,000 feet somewhere above the corn belt, en route from Charlotte to Phoenix. I’m keynoting tomorrow morning in Scottsdale, then flying to LA to board a Qantas flight to Sydney for my week-long speaking tour starting Monday.

My flight to Charlotte originated at Greene Airport in Warwick, RI, about ten minutes from my home. My wife drove me over in the truck with the dogs, which was once a weekly occurrence, going back to the Great Dog Trotsky, but is now very rare. Before flying home from Europe two weeks ago, my last plane ride was in May.

At 6:30 am my wife, Koufax, and Buddy all yawned goodbye, and I headed for airport security, which is run very well at Greene. Three security people checked IDs in a fast moving line, and I reached my guy in less than 30 seconds. He held up my passport, looked at my boarding pass, made a crack about my photo, initialed the paper boarding pass I had printed up the day prior, and waved me on. This took about a half-minute.

I then placed in bins my liquids, computer, gasses, rare ores, change, Lone Ranger decoder ring, photos of Michelle Pfeiffer, mementoes from Monte Carlo, and enteric X-rays; removed six articles of clothing, and walked through the metal detector. As my possessions slid past, another security guy politely checked my boarding pass, then indicated I could repack and redress. The guy behind me looked enviously at my Pfeiffer photos.

This entire procedure took about two minutes.

Reassembled, I headed for one last guy at a podium next to a small exit gate. He gave a five-second perfunctory glance at the boarding pass, and told me to have a nice day, though with less relish than I would have preferred. I had plenty of leeway to boarding time, so I stopped by the shoeshine stand and took a seat while another customer was finishing up.

It was while sitting there, idly glancing at my boarding pass, that I noticed the wrong time on it: 11:20. But my flight, I knew, was to depart at 8:10.

That was when I realized I had pulled out the connection boarding pass, gone through Greene security showing my Charlotte to Phoenix boarding pass, which was now initialed and very official, but was not going to get me on the plane TO Charlotte. So, I simply switched the boarding passes, got my shoes shined, and got on board. Three trained professionals had approved me with the wrong boarding pass.

Now, these folks at security were quite polite and very professional and doing their best. But I will posit that the entire security apparatus is designed merely to give us a perception of safety and a feeling of confidence. It does not decrease any but the most amateurish of evil people. (The real vulnerability at most airports is the food, fuel, and service trucks which constantly enter and exit and traverse the grounds.)

The billion dollar security business is about managing perceptions. (I travel with a three-and-three-quarters-inch scissor, which is fine, but four inches is not. Who makes this stuff up?) Analogously, The current financial bailout is to give the impression that something is being done, though no one but no one has any idea about all the variables and whether it will work. It’s about assurance (not ensurance or insurance) in a segment, investing, where confidence, mood, and perception are everything.

The security people did their best but they are in a paralyzingly numbing job. Marshall McLuhan pointed out that the price of eternal vigilance is indifference. If three consecutive people could stare at a boarding pass not even originating in their airport, with a flight and gate that don’t exist there, and miss the error, what does that tell you about the efficacy of the system dealing with millions of people a day?

I’ll concede that perception is reality. And maybe a great many people’s perception is that all the fuss and feathers in airport security—the humiliation of being treated like a criminal, of taking off clothing, of revealing personal items, of being sniffed and frisked and delayed—is worth the time and trouble and fortune.

But my perception is that we need more substance and less simulation, more concern about probabilities, and less energy spent on innocent people losing a bottle of shampoo because it contains over three ounces of, well, shampoo.

I don’t know who’s going to be elected or even for whom I’ll vote, but I’ll tell you what kind of checking we need him to encourage at the airports, in our financial markets, and in our lives.

A reality check.

© Alan Weiss 2008. All rights reserved.