I have always liked to travel but I have always hated flying. It tires me out, I get sick, and the whole airport thing is a drag.

And that was before I had a kid. Traveling with a child is exponentially more difficult that traveling solo or with a spouse. It is exhausting and stressful and when you add in the bad treatment I have received on two trips by the TSA - positively infuriating.

This past week we went on vacation and I find myself asking (again) what the fuck we need the TSA for? Since 9-11, airport travel has become a nightmare.

This article indicates that I am not alone in my dissatisfaction with the TSA but that is small comfort.

Complaints Against Airport Security Surge

New Numbers Don't Bode Well For Holiday Fliers, but TSA Blames Faulty Counts in Past

By SCOTT MCCARTNEY

November 20, 2007

Wall Street Journal

Complaints about Transportation Security Administration screening at airports have surged in the past several months -- and the reason depends on whom you ask.

Recent tallies of complaints about TSA service (not counting baggage-damage reports) suggest the agency did have a difficult time keeping up with big crowds this past summer. Complaints to the TSA about security courtesy, procedures, processing time and personal property fell sharply during the first five months of the year, but began climbing in June, with a 9.2% jump in the total number of complaints, compared with June 2006. By August, total service complaints were 88.1% higher than a year earlier, and September, the most recent month reported by the government, saw a 71.4% increase in TSA complaints.

Mr. Hawley says that's largely the result of a change in May that increased the TSA's capacity to receive complaints. That month, the agency moved its customer-service department out of its headquarters to a new site, adding telephone lines, computer bandwidth and better software to track complaints. "Now we're able to receive all the input everyone calls in," Mr. Hawley says.

In my entire life, there has been one terrorist attack on US soil - 9-11. Although thousands of people died, shouldn't that single event be considered an aberation? Was it really justification to change the entire flight system? And did we have to do such a half-assed job?

Our airports are not built for security.

The TSA procedures are totally inconsistent from one airport the next.

At one airport they made my 1-year old daughter remove her shoes for X-rays. Seriously? You are going to fit a shoe bomb in a 2-inch shoe? Or my flip flops? At first, it was only shoes with thick heels that could conceal something. Now even my sunglasses are suspect of being a concealed weapon. Give me a break.

Things have gotten out of hand and the seeming randomness of the process does not inspire confidence.

Have they caught a SINGLE terrorist with these search procedures? Oh right, they cannot tell us that - the information is classified...

All we can know for sure is that we have created another huge, annoying government agency that costs a lot of money, inconveniences millions of people and delivers very questionable results.