Returning To Obama's America

DISCLAIMER: The title of this post isn't quite fair, but not entirely unfair either.

So I arrive back in JFK after a week abroad. After the long flight, I get to the immigration line. The line is separated into two sections, one for "Americans" and one "Visitors". The line for the Americans was twice as long (~200 people) as the line for Visitors, there appeared to be ~2 times the number of stations servicing visitors as there were servicing Americans, only one of the stations servicing Americans had an agent present and that agent was apparently not processing anybody.

A number of people stuck in the long unmoving line began checking their emails on their PDAs. A lady in the Airline uniform came over and confiscated one young lady’s PDA announcing that they were not allowed. On being politely questioned, she asserted that she had been clearly announcing the rule for some time. People in the crowd witnessing this scene responded – as was the case – that none of us heard any such announcement. She followed by proclaiming that there were clear signs. People in the crowd questioned this as well asking her to point out any such signs, which she could not. Instead, she berated us, lecturing that it was “common sense” that we were prohibited from using cell-phones. The poor girl whose cellphone was taken, was forced to debase herself and humor/flatter the uniformed lady in an thankfully ultimately successful effort to retrieve her property. The banality of evil was brought readily to mind.

At some point, the line started moving quickly and we were fortunate to get to a station. Unfortunately, the line froze there. From what we can tell they were rolling out some sort of software upgrade. The mechanism for this was to distribute CDs to agents that had absolutely no idea what they were supposed to do with them and what they did do with them broke their systems. After a few minutes of inter-agent banter to the effect of "How do these disks work?" all but one of the agents packed up and left their stations. The one agent left was instructed to hold off installing the disk, so his system was still running and he was stuck processing the whole line by himself.

I can't wait until the people behind this are ru(i)nning our health care.