avram | A Thanksgiving rant (Reply)

I spent a good chunk of today furious at the Greyhound bus company, which will never see a penny of mine again.

I was supposed to come up here (Chris’s brother’s place, in Massachusetts) yesterday, but had to see a man about a lease (We signed! We’ve got the apartment!), so I told Chris to go up by herself and I’d follow today. My schedule was tight enough that I decided to go with Greyhound from the Port Atrocity, a known quantity, rather than gambling on a slower, cheaper bus from Chinatown that ladymondegreen had told me about.

Oh, one more thing you need to know: I’m in the habit of carrying a Leatherman Wave multitool on my belt. This amazingly handy chunk of finely-crafted technology contains a knife, a file, a saw, scissors, screwdrivers, and a needle-nose pliers. I find uses for it pretty much every damn day, from opening packages to trimming my beard to cutting paintbrushes down to a more convenient size.

Back to the narrative: I’d taken Greyhound for my trip up here earlier in the month. At the NYC end, nobody’d given a damn about security. At the Boston end for my return trip I’d been scanned with a metal-detection wand, and told that my tool would have to either go in checked luggage or be carried by the driver; I went with the latter, to avoid the inconvenience of checking luggage. Perfectly understandable, there have been incidents with passengers getting violent on buses, it’s not unreasonable to take knives away for the duration of the trip. This time I was prepared, and stuck an address tag on my overnight bag so I could check it and stuck my Leatherman in there.

No joy. Just a few minutes before scheduled departure time on the last bus I’d be able to take to get to Boston at a reasonable time, the security goons searched my overnight bag (as it turns out I could have stuck the thing in my shoulder bag, under my laptop, and they’d never have found it), found the tool, and told me it couldn’t go on the bus, period. Not in checked baggage, not carried by the driver, not at all. And with the post office closed for the holiday, it’s not as if I could mail it somewhere, even if I’d had time. So they basically just confiscated it. Fucking morons. I hate how stupid the fear of terrorism has made my countrymen.

Now I know how gun owners feel about gun control. I’ve opposed gun control for years, but on an intellectual level; it’s in my gut now. The helpless fury of having a useful tool taken away because some fear-blind idiot won’t feel safe unless I’m helpless and infantilized.

I may continue this rant tomorrow; I’ve got to get off the computer in the next few minutes.