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SUMMARY: A straight forward "real-world" story about the dangers of living in Paranoid America 2006. A reminder on the 5th anniversary of 9-11 that not all humans are terrorists and not all situations should inspire fear.

"The Ahi Affair"
William Hrdina

I don't know if you've ever had a boring, repetitive job.
They can be quite painful. Soul draining, mundane, redundant, full of urgh.
If urgh's not a word, it should be: urgh expresses what it is like to do such a job perfectly.
And I should know because I have one.
It's horrid.
Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful for any job that pays the bills- especially these days- there's plenty of people who would kill for even a terrible job. Thankfully, the monkey in the White House will be gone in a couple of years- not that I think that will change anything either. He'll only be replaced by some other monkey.
Anyway, I'm not rich, I'm not even affluent, but my wife and I ain't starving. So that's nice.
But work.
Egads work.
Intellectual stimulation? Nada, nothing, zilch- the big itinerant zippo.
I might as well be dead while I'm at work. I think I'd be happier. I go into work, I shut off my skull and 8 hours later I wake up again and go back to being a human being.
So where is this mindless prison?
I work at the ticket counter at Jet Green at a major international airport in the south that shall remain nameless to protect the innocent- whoever they are and if they even exist. My technical title is "Initial Customer Embarkment Facilitator and Baggage Hold Content Processor."
Sounds fancy doesn't it?
It's not.
My job has always been mindless. People come up to the counter, I rattle off the same list of questions, pretend like I care about why the fat woman has to have an aisle seat, weigh the bags, hand over the boarding pass and repeat. Ad infinitum.
Then 9-11 happened, and what was a barely bearable job slipped down so that my eyes, which had heretofore been just out of the muck, finally slid under. Now, on top of doing these mundane tasks all day, I'm supposed to take them VERY SERIOUSLY.
Three times a year we have to go to what they call "motivational" meetings where they do their level best to convince everyone that every passenger- even the 85 year old woman with white hair and a walker- could really be a terrorist in disguise.
This state of affairs creates a rather difficult to manage dichotomy in the minds of every Initial Customer Embarkment Facilitator. Think about it, not only is every person that comes to my counter a customer- people who we are supposed to satisfy and please- you are also someone we are supposed to distrust, be paranoid about, and probably hate just a little bit.
In reality, everyone is just trying to get to wherever they're going. We are a mobile society- thousands and thousands of people fly daily. Now I'm in no way saying terrorists don't exist- but they are so few and far between that, statistically at least, they don't. Obviously this creates a bit of a disconnect between reality as it is (almost no terrorists), and the false reality we are constantly told to be afraid of (everyone is a terrorist).
My job used to be tedious, but it was bearable- I would come in, do my eight hours and go home.