No Runny Eggs

I came home from work and found a letter envelope from Homeland Security. Not sure that I really wanted to know the answer, I opened the envelope and found the following letter:

A few observations:

• I didn’t “may have experienced” anything!  I did experience it!  They make it sound like I’m some tin foil hat type reporting that I’ve been abducted by aliens!
• “DHS cannot ensure your travel will always be delay-free…For instance, an airline might still require a brief period of time to comply with identity verification requirements prior to issuing a boarding pass”– Huh?  Who’s driving the bus?  No wonder people get caught for no apparent reason!  Multiple bureaucracies trying to align their methods, procedures and databases.  Oh, yeah, that’s sure to be a smooth running process!
• “Based on our analysis of those persons who have applied for redress through DHS TRIP, more than 99 percent are not on a Federal watch list.”  You must be kidding!  The program that is supposed to be ensuring our air safety has a 99 percent false positive?  With that high of a false positive, how many positives (people who should be on the list) do you think they are missing?  I guess this explains all the stories of grannies and six year olds being frisked and taken aside by airport TSA!

I’ve spent a considerable amount of my career involved with interactions with customers.  If one of my staff brought this letter to me and said they were about to send it to a customer, my reaction would be, “Are you nuts?  Even if it’s true, why would you be sending a letter to a customer telling them we’re incapable of doing our job?”  I would follow that up with, “If this is true, we have a lot of work to do!  We’re starting today and not stopping until we have a process that we can stand behind that is efficient and for which we can tell our customers how, what and why we are doing what we are doing!”

I’ll be flying again within the next couple of weeks.  I’ll let you know if any of this gobbledygook actually translates to “I can fly” or whether I’ll be again relying on my Peter Pan happy thought to provide air transport!

Stay tuned.