The Daily O’Collegian

“You realize you are a traitor to this country, right?” my friend asks the TSA Officer in Tulsa International Airport as we make our second trip through airport security that morning.

Maybe I should explain how my brother, my friend and I got to this point before going on about this.

We took a trip to visit an old college friend who has graduated from OSU and moved to Boston to pursue a career. There were no problems with security on our way there or leaving Boston, but our sequential flight from Detroit to Wichita is where things started to go wrong, very wrong.

First, everything was going smoothly until about 30 minutes before our arrival in Wichita. Some thunderstorms in the area caused the pilots to divert the flight from Wichita to Tulsa, and this is where the fun started.

Touchdown in Tulsa was about 8:45 p.m., which was about the time we were supposed to arrive in Wichita.

An announcement came over the plane’s intercom:

“We are currently waiting for a different plane to move so we can refuel and, if the weather clears, we will try to get you to Wichita shortly.”

Great, this will be over before we know it. Around 10 p.m., we and the other passengers started to wonder why we haven’t moved since first landing.

Another announcement comes over the intercom:

“Terribly sorry about this, but since it has taken so long, we are going to disembark the plane and will be setting all of you up with hotel vouchers for a chartered plane to take you straight to Wichita first thing in the morning.”

Fine, they made us wait on the plane for more than an hour, but at least they are making things right as efficiently as possible.

If only it were that simple. We are finally allowed to get off the plane about 10:45 p.m. All of the passengers were directed to the Northwest Airlines help desk to get our hotel voucher so we can retire for the night. With one person working the desk and about 25 passengers waiting for vouchers, it takes some time to get everything worked out.

Before the first vouchers are even handed out, we were told they were searching for a bus. Yes, a bus will be taking us to Wichita tonight instead of us staying in a hotel.

OK, but as you may remember, we were still at the airport the next morning.

After trashing the idea of the bus because no driver could be found, we were finally allowed to have a hotel room at 3:30 a.m., but were told to show up at the airport again at 6 a.m.

Disgruntled, we made our way back to the airport in the morning and were given hand-written boarding passes to a plane leaving at 10 a.m. We were going to ask why we arrived at 6 a.m., but at this point we had stopped caring.

We made our way through security to the terminal and sat down to wait.

An NWA employee approached us and said, “This plane never existed, we are shifting you to American Airlines, but instead of a direct flight, you will be flying to Dallas and then waiting for a flight to Wichita until 2:30 p.m.”

We were taken to get our real boarding passes and made to go through security again. We soon learned that every passenger on our original flight had been “randomly” selected for additional screening by TSA.

After all the problems the airport put us through, we were taken aside, physically patted down, had our belongings searched and had our sandals swabbed for explosives.

What happened to it being illegal for unlawful search and seizures without probable cause? Remember the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution? Guess none of that matters anymore.

Random now means “we do it to whoever we want, whenever we want, too bad.”