Got a visit from the SSSS
Monday, January 23, 2012 at 5:11PM So I’m coming back from Toronto to Milwaukee this past Sunday and had a new experience at the Toronto airport (YYZ)—“new” here is a euphemism for “irksome,” “riled me up,” and “I wanna make a donation to Ron Paul’s campaign!” It seems that I caught the eye of my beloved country’s TSA, despite living a life that is hardly an invitation to special airline security scrutiny. For reasons I still don’t know, I got a visit from the SSSS. Here’s what happened.
My wife and I got to Toronto’s airport terminal 1 in plenty of time to do all the things needed to catch our 6:00 p.m. flight back to Milwaukee. She, a veteran of weekend trips from Milwaukee (MKE) to Toronto (YYZ) and back—regularly visiting her aging mother—led me to these neat check-in kiosks, where you slide in your passport, answer a few questions by using the keyboard on the touch-type screen, and obtain your boarding pass. Gotta love modern technology.
She went first. Insert passport. Scanned and done. Where are you heading? MKE. Your first name? Norah. Change your assigned seat? Nope. Got baggage? Husband. One bag. Le voici: printed boarding pass.
Then it was my turn. Insert passport. Scanned and done. Where are you heading? MKE. Your first name? Mark. Change your assigned seat? Sure, sit next to wife, 10F. Got baggage? Nope. Waiting… Waiting… Spinning circle thingie… Rien. “We’re sorry, we cannot provide you your boarding pass at this time. Please see ‘customer assistance’ for help.”
Him: “Huh, what gives? I answered everything right. I did what you did.”
Her: “You must have done something wrong. Try it again.”
Him: “Okay, watch me answer the questions.” (Note: original conversation was saltier).
Same input, same result. So I dutifully went to the long line for the ‘Customer assistance,’ while my wife hopped over to the quicker-moving ‘Baggage drop-off’ line. After an eternity I got to the counter, gave the courteous Air Canada agent my flight information, and he effortlessly printed up my boarding pass. “Why was I not able to get my boarding pass at the kiosk?,” I asked. “Oh, sometimes this happens to randomly selected passengers,” he replied. I had yet to learn what “this” meant.
Dashing through the corridor I caught up to my waiting wife, only to be greeted by a protracted, serpentine line, where we both inched towards the US Customs officials. We were directed to station no. 28. The agent looked me over much longer that I was comfortable with, and with his pen circled somewhere on my boarding pass, and let us through. Next stop, security.
We both made our way to the inlet for more serpentine lines, at length handing our boarding passes to the guard. He looked at hers, directed her to the right, and then took my pass. He studied the pass, pulled out a pink highlighter, overwrote something on it, and directed me towards the left. As I stood in a lonely line near a bunch of X-ray machines, I could see my wife ease through her security check, and pass out of view.
An agent at the machines asked for my boarding pass, looked at it, and then promptly spoke into her walkie-talkie thingie to others at the station, all of whom then read me well enough not to forget me. I placed all the usuals into the bins: shoes, wallet, pocket change, iPhone, backpack, coat, belt, watch, etc. As I used my carry-on bag to push my other bins towards the x-ray machine the security agent stopped me, took the bag, and had me move my other belongings forward by hand; the bag was to stay behind. So was my boarding pass.
As I worked my way towards to full-body scanner I noticed her opening my bag, just a tad, and inserting something that seemed to be a probe into it, which she pulled out, and then inserted into a machine—evidently she had taken some sort of sample or other, and had it checked by the machine. Shoeless, beltless, and wifeless, I waited on the other side of the full-body scan for five minutes, holding only my passport. Finally I saw my bag work its way towards me, down the rolling track from the x-ray machine. The agent handed me back my boarding pass, said “Thank you, sir, you’re free to go. Enjoy your flight,” and I recombabulated at the end of the line, and went over to meet my wife, who was waiting on the other side of the security area. “What was that all about?,” she asked. “Dunno,” I said, looking down at my now-coveted boarding pass. My eye was drawn to the swath of pink highlighter that stood out against its otherwise black-and-white presentation.
There, underneath the pink, in the “Comments” section of the boarding pass, circled in pen twice by studious agents, were the letters “SSSS.” And somewhere along the line some other agent had written out those letters on his own towards the top of the boarding pass, circling them for good measure. No one explained anything to me, and not a word about the meaning of these quadruple S’s.
SSSS? How about “secondary security screening selection”?—a designation which, to believe things you read on Internet chat-boards, could stick with me on future flights, and for quite some time.
Oh, why were my wife and I in traveling to Toronto in the first place? To bury her beloved mother, who had gone to eternal life the Sunday evening previous, and whom we buried the day before.
