Is it me or is LA international the meanest place in America?
Rod and some extended family came through LAX last night to catch the last leg of our trip home on the late pm flight.
Leaving beautiful warm Mazatlan Mexico to land in LAX and go through customs is always a shock. First y0u are herded into "stalls" at customs staffed by foreign looking people whose job seems to be to assume YOU are a terrorist hell bent on doing the whole place in.
I prepared my son JR that you will feel like a slimeball trying to sneak in disease laden fruit that will destroy the entire agriculture industry of the US and the existance of many other countries. Then Alaska Airlines will herd you around via overweight female minority workers whose only people skills seem to be verbal yelling and gesturing until they get you and your "checked" bags out of the terminal and onto the sidewalk to try and figure out where to go with your "checked" luggage without a guide.
Every time it is the same, weary passengers, dragging heavy "checked" luggage down the sidewalk asking each other and total strangers "are we going the right way". Finally we all somehow find the right line in the next building only to be yelled out some more as we drop our "checked" baggage off for the airline and are told to DOUBLE BACK through the same crowded line of weary passengers trying to get their "checked" luggage to the next terminal for this ineffecient airport.
Daughter Bethany accidently had a third of a bottle of water in her carry on when she got to the last check point. The employee told her to go dump it out and go to the BACK OF THE LINE (now another whole flight of people had come in) and go through the whole security check again with her empty water bottle! (her favorite metal bottle was not going to be left behind)
I know people coming back from vacation and sun to the realities of life are not always that fun to deal with...maybe we have made these employees mean? But, seemed to me the passengers were the ones trying to get along and make things work?
I would like to write about Mexico....ahhhhh. Maybe I will once I get over the trauma of coming home!
2 comments:
I think it's only fair to say this if you've been to every airport in America.
It's true. I have been to most of the major border airports in the United States and LAX is uniformly THE worst. There is something missing in the training regimine or management expectations at this airport that makes gives staff an overwhelming superiority complex and causes them to behave in an incredibly high-handed and rude fashion. I appreciate rigor in the screening process. It's necessary in a post-911 environment. But there's a difference between rigor and rude. After my last trip through LAX I was fuming to the point where I wrote my senator--not that it did much good. Good for you, Linda, for pointing this out.
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