At the airport early morning en route to NYC on the 4th of July (so packed as fuck) with a friend to play a show two days later, we were pulled out of the ID/ticket check queue just as we made it to the front, after standing in a barely crawling line for maybe an hour. Some airport police armed and with dogs had gone by the line by just previous, I saw/heard no indication of canine reaction but apparently one of the cops or whatever had and sternly commanded me to come with them. They figure out my friend is with me and do the same to him, he lets out an incredulous “Really? Why?” as he obviously passed the dog’s sniff test and had literally just been given the go-ahead from ID check. Man responds in absolute rage screaming “YEAH REALLY, BECAUSE I SAID SO” at which the three hundred or so other people in line quickly fall silent and whip their necks around to stare at us with what felt like a mix of instant suspicion (could it be? the pre-empting of a ‘Murica day terrorist attack?), second-hand docility and secret relief that it was none of them being picked on. We are taken aside and led to an extra bag security check station, no one will tell us what the apparent issue is. First they completely empty all our tightly packed bags, take their time checking every single item and question me about the 1/4” patch and speaker cables in my bag, I have to explain what guitar pedals are but they neither acknowledge nor pretend even to listen to what I’m saying as if to presume I’m lying. At this point they say they’re going to call the bomb squad in and tell us to sit and wait because it could be a while. After maybe half an hour of waiting we begin to complain that we are probably going to miss our flight, they say we are getting ahead of ourselves, we should “calm down” and everything will be fine. “Bomb squad” shows up and say they need to inspect and x-ray my fucking shoe… Another thirty minutes or so go by, they claim to have detected residue of explosive materials on my shoe (which is complete bullshit) but that we can go. We begin packing everything back up and insist that we have definitely missed our flight, which they again dismiss implying they have been in contact with the gate and that we have nothing to worry about. Sure enough we get to our gate and have missed our flight, we head straight back to where they held us, couldn’t have been more than ten minutes and none of the same five or six people are there anymore, “bomb squad” included. Airline wants nothing to do with our complaints since our holdup is outside of their responsibility, next flight to NYC is not for another 12 hrs so we bus to the nearby city and haul our things around all day killing time trying not to spend what meager spending money we had stashed for the trip. The flight that night went over smoothly, though. Can only imagine how much shittier, longer and less exceptional that would’ve been if we weren’t a couple of young white guys but rather fit their regular profile for that kind of stupid harassment.
As a bonus, on the way back home after our return flight we are on a bus waiting for the stop at which we are supposed to get off and transfer onto another route. Bus never gets onto the street where our stop is at, my friend approaches the driver to ask why he didn’t make that stop. Not sure what kind of day the driver was having but he simply shakes his head and laughs at my friend and doesn’t explain anything. After a long day of traveling (we live in the Pacific Northwest) my friend is not happy with the guy and is obviously insulted, indignantly explaining to the guy that he just wanted to know why we missed our stop. Driver continues to passive aggressively laugh at my friend at which point he returns to the seat next to mine to complain, I suggest we just get off at the nearest transit center to see if we can get some help figuring out how to transfer since typically the stop we missed is the only one at which to do so and transit website hadn’t mentioned anything. Some cow of a woman looks over at us and informs us that the stop has been closed for a week, “haven’t you heard? I don’t see how you wouldn’t have noticed,” as if there were no chance we, with all our luggage, were from out of town, or even hadn’t ridden this bus in this godforsaked shithole area off the side of the freeway for *over a week*. We stew in the parochial ignorance and lack of sympathy on this bus for a little longer until we reach the transit center. My friend walks up to the first employee he can find to figure out what we’re supposed to do, immediately the driver darts over to them and interrupts, saying my friend is an idiot who didn’t pay attention to where we were going, probably nervous my friend was issuing a complaint about his shitty attitude, when all we wanted was to get home. My friend instantly gets upset and makes some reference to the previous situation, they loudly argue for a moment, and the employee seems to either tacitly side with the driver or else evade the situation altogether and ceases to help my friend. We ask around and eventually figure out what to do, a bit of walking but it certainly wasn’t very complicated or commensurate to the supposed mistake these miserable people seemed to think we had made.
All that said this was absolutely nothing compared to IdleRich’s stories which I enjoyed (?) reading.