It's Probably Just Me

Spending a great deal of time in airports lately gave me an opportunity to do some serious people watching. I don't know what you look at when doing so, but I usually look at feet, and what I noticed recently is probably something of which OSHA or perhaps the TSA needs to be made aware. I'm talking about safety of air travelers...serious stuff. This week, the TSA was all over an 80-year-old woman who followed me through the screening process and had Kleenex in her shirt breast pockets, and harangued me about the dangers of carrying Old Wisconsin hot dogs in a carry-on, but they ignored the most obvious danger to those about to enter the various concourses and step onto and off of those dangerous moving walkways.
I'm talking about people wearing flip flops and other pseudo-shoe items instead of real shoes. Not only does this kind of footwear lend itself to getting caught in cracks and crevices of escalators, moving walkways and doorways boarding trams and trains, they make it impossible for a late-arriving passenger to sprint to the appropriate gate. Sure, they're easy to get on and off going through security, but after that...nightmare. And the "slap, slap, slap" of hundreds of people walking through the terminal left my ears ringing for hours. Of course, this warning applies mostly to young people between,s ay 10 and 25 and a great number of females as well. If my observations can be related to a wider population, anyone over the age of 50 wears New Balance sneakers. Asics seems to be the brand favored by serious-looking athlete types. Women past 25 usually wear Toms, though a percentage still cling to the stubbed-toe possibilities by wearing open-toed sandals or flip flops. Young children invariably wear action figure shoes with sparkles or LED lights attached. Me? I always wear running shoes, double-knotted--ready to break into an emergency gait at a moment's notice.
But then, maybe I'm the only one who's ever had to sprint through a concourse to an alternate gate lugging two wheeled carry-on bags and a backpack. Maybe I'm the only one who's ever stumbled and almost fallen trying to exit a moving walkway. Maybe I'm the only one who values personal preference over safety from terrorists.
Even though the TSA person said to me, "Those hot dogs can kill you."