I got flagged for a random TSA pat down once and the agent asked me if I had any metal in my body. I replied “I have an IUD”. The agent freaks out and starts flagging other agents over. She musters all her calm and says “Please repeat that you have an IED on you” to which I had to say “no, an IUD, a copper intrauterine device, for birth control”. She didn’t know what an IUD was and I had to explain it to her. I bet she’ll remember now!
That happened to me too. But my TSA agent just said "You said WHAT?" And when I said IUD verrry slowly he calmed down and was like oooooh okay that's not a problem then.
To the point that video games will use IED instead of C4 or mines sometimes. Anyone who was related to the War on Terror and gaming knows what an IED is
I would guess more people in the US know what means IED as a concept (or at least most people would know it in general as a bomb) than they know what the acronym actually stands for.
Especially if they were non-military during the Iraq and Afghan wars.
Something that I've come to learn from interacting with English speakers on the internet is that they LOVE their acronyms, at least when writing. The other day I saw someone abbreviating "femboy" as "fb", which was extremely confusing until I realized they weren't talking about Facebook.
I imagine the TSA agent pulling out his training manual and frantically flipping through pages until he finds the page he's looking for. On the left page, in giant letters, it says
I’m a cop at a place I shouldn’t disclose on reddit. But it’s open to the general public. My very first arrest came from a person telling me they had a live grenade on them. He literally walked up to me and said, “I have a grenade on me.”
Everything else happened really fast. Because I had him repeat exactly what he said to me before I took him to the ground and 6 other officers showed up to help me.
He sounds like he'd be Axe Cop 's rival. Used to be Dinosaur Soldier's partner, back before the whole dinosaur blood incident when he was still flute cop.
I once went through security with a jar of live wasps in my bag. (I was studying entomology at the time) The security guy searching my bag pulled it out and gave me the most hilariously fed-up face I’ve ever seen in my life.
Let me go through, though. I guess a jar of wasps don’t count as a weapon.
Because if you release them, they're just as likely to attack the person who released them as anyone else so it's harder to use them to gain control of the plane.
I was thinking more like the chaos that could insue from opening them on a plane. Like how you can't yell "fire" in a crowded movie theater, I think opening the jar would cause panic and possibly a stampede (as much as you can get in an airplane.) then if any get into the cockpit, they could cause issues there as well.
So not using them as a weapon to take over the plane but using them as a means to hurt the people on the plane.
I had a bag full of weird boxes with organics in them. Opened it up and jumped back. Turns out the owner was some kind of spider expert and had a bunch of different live spiders in there. Now people think I'm weird for asking if they study spiders before a bag search.
If I had a nickel for every time someone walked up to me and said "I have a bomb in my bag" unprovoked I would have 2 nickels. Which is not a lot but it's weird that it happened twice... Or even once. Anyway, neither of them had a bomb but they were both weird as fuck.
Yes he did. We left the grenade there and called our hazardous devices division.(it’s called hazardous devices section. I forgot for a sec my bad)
I’m a vet, so I’ve handled grenades during basic. But my department was overly cautious so we left grenade there and moved everyone back while shutting down the road while our hazardous devices division handled it.
If the guy wasn't aggressive and just told you about the grenade was taking them to the ground necessary? i understand arresting them was necessary but it sounds like you escalated things when they didnt need to be
In fairness, "I have a live grenade on me" said calmly and without prompting is exactly what I'd expect to hear before said whacko sets off a live hand grenade.
This is a situation where context is everything, and that short post certainly doesn’t convey all of it. But in this instance, the one thing that is clear here is that the individual walked up and announced that he was armed with a deadly weapon, and they confirmed it a second time as well.
This needs to now be taken as a credible threat, regardless of whether the suspect did or did not in fact have a grenade. It’s highly unlikely that the individual would have willingly consented to being arrested, and too risky that they may make use of the weapon they are claiming to be in possession of. The smarter move in this situation is to move swiftly and incapacitate that individual to prevent them from being able to use said weapon. Afterwards, the situation can be more safely assessed to determine if the threat was real or not.
a female TSA agent even knowing what an IED is but not IUD, is baffeling. not sure how common IED encounters are for the TSA abut i assume that its several orders of magnitude less than IUD lol.
Edit: in my mind IED was roadside bombs. so i assumed IED was not a term used for carried bombs. but yhea, that makes sense that she knows about IED.
Very much depends.
My Catholic school in the deep south had comprehensive sex education classes, covering contraception, STDs, pregnancy, etc.
Granted, the whole thing was presented with a strong aura of "if you have sex before marriage you will literally die instantly". But they covered everything.
In my area, Catholic schools were really the only option for a good education outside of super expensive private schools, because the public schools are some of the worst in the country.
that's so backwards, the woman is supposed to pee during sex, and the guy pees for foreplay. Putting rubber on is correct: keeps the bed dry... hard to find a big enough sheet, tho.
That's basically what I got in 6th grade. But they had a 'any questions' part afterwards where one kid asked about why soap hurts when it gets in your pee hole; I didn't realize it at the time, but he basically told the teacher he was masturbating in the shower.
it's the first memory anytime anyone mentions sex ed. Still funny to this day.
I mean, there's so much about our bodies that isn't really common knowledge. I didn't know what an ablation was, and didn't know 2 of my 3 sisters had it. (Cauterizing the inside of your uterus so it stops building excessive layers and makes heavy periods a thing of the past if it works). My family all had terrible shitty periods, something I didn't know until coming off the pill (which also lessens periods). After an ablation, my whole life changed. it was amazing. I finally understand commercials of a woman doing ballet in white jeans on the beach for period commercials. How many millions of women would benefit from this? And have no idea that if they aren't planning on having more kids, they could stop having huge periods? Though with this administration, saying the words "not planning on having more kids" is probably the magic words to get sent right to a breeding camp. /s
I mean IED as a term was all over the news during Afghanistan and Iraq II. Not really surprising that someone would just know the term even if it wasn't specifically trained.
Learning about IED's is part of the training of anyone who does anything around an airport or even remotely related to it.
I have it as part of my training, and I'm just sitting in an office hours away from the nearest airport. I have to do this simply because, as a company, we export stuff that sometimes goes by plane, and doing this training (as part of a bunch of other requirements to allow for bulk scanning of our stuff) is easier and cheaper than having every single item we ship be individually scanned.
I'm not TSA but am a civilian employee for a DoD agency that is part of the fourth estate (which is to say, a supportive agency, not combat). Even my agency has to take yearly training which briefly covers IEDs. It would be much more surprising to me if TSA did not have training in detail about them.
And her reaction was to gather all the agents and ask them the just repeat it, instead of whipping out her pistol lol. Probably the best case scenario for that misunderstanding
See, I wouldn’t do that. If I’m going to the airport with it, I would get it professionally engineered, not ‘improvised’. So it would just be an ‘ED’. So I would apparently just be telling the TSA agent that I had erectile dysfunction.
One of my jobs when I was younger was to administer the electronic certification exams for TSA agents. When I tell you that the majority of the candidates legitimately didn't know how to type their name in a computer with a keyboard and mouse, I tell no lie. I had to teach most candidates the basics of using a mouse and keyboard (this was in the early 2000s).
It really was never about security, but the theater of it. And the people they notoriously look for aren't the type that could actually discover dangers, anyway; and it's been proven on many occasions. In the US, we tend to pick the worst solution to a problem, then blame the political opponents when it doesn't work, rather than come up with a competent solution.
Really the only thing that has changed that stopped future 9/11 styled attacks was hardening of cockpit doors from an actual security standpoint. However passengers reacting to hijackers now because it's no longer "oh we are going to Cuba I guess" but "I could be in a missile now" instead is also occuring.
Yeah you see how even just getting a rowdy now gets you ziptied and duct-tapped to a chair. If someone was actually trying to effect an attack I don't think they'd survive to see the landing. People get on planes these days with a "Wish a motherfucker would" mindset as opposed to the pre-9/11 mindset of "they just want money, this is a minor inconvenience"
We could have a good solution for $10 and have government employees, or we could spend $100, my buddies pocket $99.99, and then blame it on working class people when it fails.
America has been massively successful at what it was intended to do- create huge amounts of wealth for the few on top. Almost every single “failure” people talk about was a conscious decision with specific intended consequences.
I got a pat down last week solely because I had a bow on my outfit. No pockets. Thin outfit bc it was like 100°. They didn’t even untie the bow. They could have because my outfit had a zipper to keep it on, not the bow. It felt like theater. 🎭
i had my bag get flagged for a search once because i had a dog toy in it that was like a fake plastic branch, they thought it was a sling shot. i asked them if they thought i was going to take down the plane like Dennis the menace and nobody thought that was amusing.
Her mistaking an IUD as an IED is funny, but her believing a planned suicide bomber will casually admit they have an IED during screening is worth a giggle or two as well
TSA as our "first line of defense" 😄 I been saying it since we first created it as an agency, they're a waste of tax dollars and a violation of people's privacy. Get that ish outta here.
I would think even without general education of contraceptives, that this would be like... specifically pertinent to the training of metal detector & body scan operators of TSA.
9/11 kinda changed that outlook. Not saying its always logical but niether are bomb threats so they are going to take that very seriously and i would imagine (to some degree of misfortune) bomb threat analysis and recognition is higher up in training than human anatomy and sexual health
I didn’t know what it was but I was able to guess correctly anyway due to context and it just sounding like a birth control device name. I get that most people know different things but I feel like the TSA should’ve been able to guess correctly like I did.
Why do you think the two options are “freak out and assume she has an actual IED without clarifying” or “just assume it’s probably fine and let her go on her merry way”? Maybe try asking “could you repeat?” or “what is that?” instead of confidently assuming she has a bomb?
Same way I didn't know until the commenter explained it: I know what an intrauterine device is, but I've never heard of IUD because it's not exactly something that comes up in my regular conversations.
This leads me to assume that in the training, they are told that if someone announces they have a bomb, the procedure is to get a supervisor and have them ask them to repeat that they have a bomb to them.
I mean that’s fair honestly? Get backup and then ask the person to confirm/clarify what they said. Then if there is actually a threat there’s multiple people there to restrain the person with a bomb or weapon and help get everyone else in the area away to safety. If it’s a misunderstanding everyone goes back to normal once it’s cleared up. In either case it’s much better than one person immediately rushing in and trying to handle it alone and potentially causing mass panic in the process.
Yeah, I cant think of a better procedure but it must be awkward, especially if you do have a bomb. I want to know what the next step is. "Have them repeat that they have a bomb. If they say they do again, ask if they could safely hand it over."
A few years ago I had a TSA agent search my purse. She pulled out my EpiPen and asked if it was a weapon. I probably shouldn't have laughed, but I did, and
said no, it's my EpiPen. Her and I went back and forth as I tried to explain what epinephrine is and what it's used for. She wanted to take it and I told her no, they can't confiscate my critical, expensive medical device. She freaked out and called over another agent. The first thing out of his mouth was "you don't know what an EpiPen is?" He gave it back to me and let me go.
That's not an acronym, it's an initialism, since you don't pronounce it as a word but as individual letters. Pedantic, yeah, but it is a useful distinction to make
Reminds me of a story I read where TSA was demanding a passport for a US domestic flight because he didn’t recognize the city name and assumed it was international
I like how, believing you had an explosive device, her first instinct was to bring other TSA agents over to increase the collateral damage of an explosion.
My chest port alerted the scanner one time and they asked if I had any metal on me, so I replied “I do, not on me but you know inside me.” He held his hand up and said “Ma’am I don’t care, we’ll get a woman to pat you down” I clarified it was a medical device and he was still squirmy and uncomfortable. I was thinking okay weirdo you asked the question, I answered honestly!
Then got the most aggressive feel up of my life. Still waiting on the dinner that woman rightfully owes me. I told my friend I need a smoke after that one cause she was waiting to the side thinking I forgot my phone in my bra lol. Having traveled a lot we both were a little suprised titanium still goes off on some scanners.
So I have the same IUD. I’m embarrassed to admit, it took me a while to finally nail down the terminology IUD and and not IED. I’m military so IED is in all the training…glad to have an IUD and not an IED in my uterus!
One agent flagged me because of a discrepancy with my name. She didn't know what a "nickname" was. Couldn't for the life of her figure out why my name was different on my paperwork than what my family was calling me.
I remember having to explain in detail to a security guard what an Epipen was, took a couple minutes for him to register I wasn’t trying to sneak in drugs
I was on a ferry once many years ago, had that old fallout anthology case that looked like a mini-nuke, someone called security cause they thought I had a bomb
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u/mariahmce 29d ago
I got flagged for a random TSA pat down once and the agent asked me if I had any metal in my body. I replied “I have an IUD”. The agent freaks out and starts flagging other agents over. She musters all her calm and says “Please repeat that you have an IED on you” to which I had to say “no, an IUD, a copper intrauterine device, for birth control”. She didn’t know what an IUD was and I had to explain it to her. I bet she’ll remember now!