Mexican Radio - Wall of Voodoo

I turned in my uniforms, returned the training manuals, gave back my jacket, and walked out of the TSA Command Center for the last time. After one year, one month, and a couple of days, my days with the Transportation Security Administration have ended. I never minded the work. I still feel that I did what I could to protect a nation that I love nor did I mind the people I worked with. Most of the people I worked with in the agency did the best they could to safely transport passengers to their destinations. If there has ever been a problem with the TSA, if there are any questions about it's effectiveness, those questioning looks should be directed upwards.

Scheduling was never evenly done. I cannot tell the number of times we missed our breaks. Considering how very physical the job is, and how much you have to be on your toes mentally, a fifteen minute break can be vital. Nor could I tell you the number of times I ate an absurdly late lunch; imagine getting your lunch at four o'clock Now imagine getting that lunch on a regular basis. And weekends? I can tell you precisely how many weekends I had off while working for the agency: one. That weekend being Dragon*Con and it was taken as vacation time. I don't mind working the occasional weekend. But there were some people there who had every weekend off from the beginning. I never had a Sunday off. Never. Were there trained people who could handle scheduling properly, rotating days off so that everyone would occasionally get a weekend off and no one would consistently work on the heaviest days? Sure, a guy from Delta who had been doing their schedules for thirty years before coming to work for TSA. So what has he been doing? Wanding people at International Checkpoint, seems he wasn't connected enough to work in the office.

Even that might have been bearable if not for the fact that Congress refused to match or increase our budget from last year. This means that all those people who were working their asses off were put in a position of being fired or laid off. Since the government didn't want to pay unemployment benefits for those they laid off, they decided to make our working conditions so unbearable that people would quit on their own. They succeeded only too well. From an overage of 100 screeners, our workforce decreased to 62 below what we needed to adequately staff the checkpoints. On my last day an average of one person per week was leaving in disgust, sick of ill treatment and broken promises. Promises like one of the most basic of our needs, a place to park. After all that time, we have to pay just as much as anybody else to park our cars. My total costs this past year? Over a thousand dollars, just for the privilege of not having a schedule were I could use my supplied MARTA card.