I arrived home late this past Thursday night. It took me 30 hours to get from my hotel in Instanbul, Turkey to my apartment in Orem, Utah. You might be thinking, “Wow. 30 hours is a really long time to travel.”, but if you look throughout the course of history, it used to take a whole lot longer to travel the world. I can’t imagine how tough it would be to have to do it driving to the east coast, jumping in a boat, and then driving some more after you get to Europe. Walking would be even worse so I can’t really complain much about the length of my journey. It’s all in your perspective. If you’re grateful for things, your life gets better. When you whine, cry, and complain, it only gets worse. So let’s look at one thing that people love to complain about, airport security.

I have been in airports hundreds of times with all of the traveling that I have done in my lifetime. I have been through a lot of security checks, and things have changed considerably in the last decade. Take out your laptop, take off your shoes, put your liquids in a plastic bag, walk through this x-ray machine. Excuse me, walk through this x-ray machine? I am generally very compliant with most things in most situations. I follow rules, at times too much. However, one thing that I do not like to do is go through the x-ray machines that they have at the airport. It isn’t that I am paranoid about people at the airport seeing the images of what my body looks like. That doesn’t bother me. I wrestle in a skin tight singlet to compete in, and I don’t know how many people have seen me naked throughout all of the locker rooms that I have been in throughout the world. My x-ray paranoia really just came about by chance when I was watching my bag go through the x-ray machine.

I have noticed that a lot of the x-ray machines that are at the airport are made by Rapiscan. There is a little warning printed on the top of the opening of the machine where the conveyor belt feeds into. It says not to insert any part of your body into the machine because of the x-rays that are blasted through there. I was looking at the warning thinking, “Of course I am not going to put any part of my body in this. It’s an x-ray machine. Do you think I walk around in a lead superman suit all day long so that I can go sticking my body parts in an x-ray machine? Of course not.” As I was finishing that thought I looked at the full body scanner that people were walking into to get scanned. I noticed that that particular piece of equipment was also made by the same company Rapiscan. Then I started to think about the little warning label that I had just read, and my little brain fired up and said, “Justin, I think that we may have a problem. That equipment is made by the same company that was just telling us not to stick any body parts in it, and now they want us to walk right into a bigger x-ray machine. Sorry, not going to happen.” Since then I started opting out of the x-ray portion of the TSA screening and I prefer the pat down.

I have to be honest that since I have started getting the pat down, it has definitely made trips a little bit more interesting. Sometimes when you request a pat down, the TSA agent looks really nervous, like I am trying to hide something from him. It’s like they think I am requesting the pat down to appear like I have nothing to hide, but then really I do. It makes me laugh.

During my layover in Houston from this last trip that I went on, I left the airport to catch a bite to eat with a friend and former high school team mate. When I came back to the airport and was going through security, they wanted to send me through the x-ray. I opted out, and I asked for the pat down instead. The TSA agent was like, “Are you sure you want the pat down? We don’t show the images of your body anymore.” I told her that wasn’t the problem and that I would still like the pat down. I had to wait a minute until another agent was available to give me the pat down, but then he came over, gave me the pat down, and put the little swab cloth on the machine that detects explosives. The machine went off, which really surprised me, so the agent said that they would need to give me another pat down. Another agent came over and escorted me to the private screening area where they would be doing the pat down. Once again the agents seemed nervous as they explained to me how they would be doing the pat down and how they would be going over sensitive areas with the backs of their hands. I kind of feel bad for them because they probably feel creepy having to grope people all day.

What they told me next sort of shocked and confused me. The agent said that on top of the regular pat down that they would be doing three horizontal and three vertical swipes over my crotch area. I tried not to laugh because I really thought that the situation was a little ridiculous. I guess that if you are planning on hiding an explosive that you are going to try to conceal it with your man parts? How did they come to that conclusion? Was it just a random idea to start swiping people’s crotches or is there some research that says, “Yes. People are more likely to hide explosives near their genitals.”? Either way they gave me the pat down and the swipes. The results came back negative, obviously, and I was on my way with another interesting story to tell people about. And all because one day I paid a little bit of attention to what was going on around me.