The shorter line
I mentioned last week that I was in Santa Ana for work.
On my way back to Seattle, something on right on the edge of remarkability happened.
I was flying back through the evocatively named John Wayne Airport. John Wayne is small, for an airport, not quite a mere regional outlet but it only has a couple dozen terminals. It is the kind of airport that you can’t get lost in.
I was going through security, which is usually a non-event. I have TSA Precheck — the thing that lets you go into the faster line and keep your shoes on and all of that stuff.
Precheck is usually a risky endeavor at the smaller airports, in my experience.
At larger airports (like Seattle, which isn’t even that big) it’s a straightforward proposition: a couple of the security lines have Precheck, one is usually dedicated for Precheck (but its not worth traipsing across the airport for), it’s pretty much always faster.
At smaller airports, though, its a bit of a crap-shoot: they might not have a Precheck line at all, or there’s a Precheck line but you still have to go through regular security procedures, etc. etc.
Flying out of John Wayne last week was a completely new thing for me, though. It was the first time it was straight up faster for me to go through regular security than it was to go through precheck. There were two lines: one for each, parallel to each other, and there was one agent staffing each line. There were like sixty folks ahead of me in the Precheck line and literally one person in the normal line. There was nothing procedurally awry: there was just a huge number of Precheck folks waiting patiently in their line, and then one person in the other line. After some puzzled glances shared with my fellow queue-mates, I jumped out of the Precheck line and waltzed over to the other one.
Sure, I had to take my shoes off. Sure, I had to take my laptop out of the bag. But I saved like fifteen minutes!
I am not exaggerating when I say that this anecdote has been stuck in my head all week. It felt like a fable somehow: a small encounter I was meant to extract a larger lesson from. Something about the fastest road not always being the fastest road? About tragedy of the commons? About sunk costs?
I dunno. None of that really tracks. Sometimes small weird moments are just small weird moments. But I felt obliged to share it with y’all.
Happy Sunday
I hope you get to keep your shoes on.