Flyin' high in the friendly sky without ever leaving the ground

Something interesting -- and slightly disturbing -- happened this past Saturday.

My wife has been finishing up her master's degree through Georgian Court University in New Jersey; we moved to Chicago during her last year, so she's lately been interacting with her professor over e-mail regarding her thesis.

Lisa gets an e-mail from her professor with some corrections for the final draft, the professor asking her to call her on her cell for clarifications. So Lisa calls her professor, and it's agreed that after the corrections, the thesis will be bound and officially submitted. The plan was to send the paper to the school via FedEx, but the professor mentioned that she was in Louisville for a convention and was flying back on Saturday and needed to make a connecting flight at O'Hare, and she half-jokingly suggested that perhaps Lisa would want to meet her at the airport to hand the thesis over directly rather than spending money on FedEx. Well, she took the professor up on her offer.

I drive Lisa over to O'Hare on Saturday and head over to the cell phone lot. The plan was that the professor would come out, collect the thesis, and go back through security to make her connecting flight. Well, before I even get halfway to the cell phone lot, she calls me on my cell phone and says, "Guess where I am!" My first guess was that the professor landed really early and that the hand-off had already been made and she wants me to come back and pick her up. Nope -- she was calling me from the gate! Let me explain.

Lisa was hoping that there might be a chance she could make things easier for her professor so that she wouldn't have to go through security, so she asked a TSA rep if there was something that could be done to expedite the process, like have someone take the thesis over to the gate agent or whatever. The TSA rep said that it's up to the airline.

So Lisa goes over to the airline counter and explains the situation and even shows the airline rep her thesis. Well...basically, the airline issued her what was basically a fake boarding pass so she could go through security and then straight to the gate!

Aren't airlines supposed to be, oh, I dunno...more secure in this post-9/11 era? Isn't the whole reason they only allow people with boarding passes through security is to reduce security risks??? Was it nice when we were able to go straight to the gate to meet our arriving parties? Yes, but most people are willing to put up with the slight inconvenience if it means that we're all a bit safer.

My wife is thinking of trying this with the airline we usually take to see if they do the same thing.