Yesterday around noon CEDT found me in Frankfurt talking to a security person in front of the United check-in counter. You know, the one that swipes your passport, asks you if your luggage has been under your control and then lets you go to check in after giving you a color coded sticker. This time was different. The questions kept coming.
“How long have you been in Germany? Who did you see? What is their relationship to you? How well do you know them? Where did you come from this morning? Why did you stop in Germany? Where did you stay in Qatar?”
This was a first for me after more than a decade of bouncing in and out of Frankfurt. After the first few questions, I got a bit annoyed but it didn’t take me long to figure out that I had been flagged for some reason and this was a behavioral profile session. A quick sneaky peek of the security guy’s screen confirmed this. There was a dialog box prompting him to keep asking questions of a certain type and gauge responses. I didn’t catch the details, but didn’t need to.
“When did you check in at Doha? How many bags did you check in? Did you collect them here in Frankfurt? Were you asked to bring anything with you by anybody else? What groups did you associate with in your travels? Has your laptop been serviced since you bought it?”
Knowing that something was up and having plenty of time before my departure, I did my best to both relax a bit and do my best to answer his questions as clearly as possible. After all, this is the kind of airport security I prefer to the obvious theater that is performed by the TSA in the United States. I was happy to play along, but was hoping that we could get to the bottom of everything pretty quickly. I managed to sneak another look at the security guy’s screen and saw my flight details as well as a bunch of timestamps. I couldn’t quite make out the timestamps, but they seemed to be from earlier that morning.
“Where did you stay in Doha? What hotel? Do you have any documentation or paperwork that indicates your stay? Did you go anywhere else?”
I thought back through my moves. I’d left Doha after midnight and arrived in Frankfurt in the early morning. I had a long layover, so I’d gone through Passkontrolle to meet up with my friend Patrick Lenz and have breakfast. Now I was coming back and, oh wait a minute…
“Why do you have three bags checked in, but only a boarding pass from Doha to here? Where are your boarding passes for San Francisco and Portland?”
There it was. I was in an inconsistent state to the norm. Clear as day. After all, it’s not unusual to go out of the airport on a layover while your checked luggage stays in the system, but when you do it, you’ve almost always got your boarding passes for your ongoing flights and so go directly back through security and to your gate. You’re not normally stopping at the ticket counter to pick up boarding passes. The only reason I was there was that when I checked in with Lufthansa in Doha, they couldn’t print out my United boarding passes for my San Francisco and Portland flights thanks to the current system integration problems with the merged United-Continental SHARES system that’s been such the IT disaster. I was checked in and my bags were checked through, but without boarding passes, I was a walking exception that even a pretty basic rule-based system would easily flag.
After explaining why I didn’t have boarding passes to the security guy a few different ways, I watched him visibly relax a notch. He asked a few more questions just to follow up. I smiled. He smiled. We were done. I picked up my boarding passes from the ticket counter agent and went on my merry way while cursing United’s system integration decisions under my breath. I hope they get that sorted out sooner rather than later.
Posted by James Duncan Davidson.