the SPOT program

[derien]

It's 52 degrees and it's been gusty windy since last night. Supposedly this is the remains of that last hurricane, Nicole (I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but that's what I heard at work). The ground is wet, but it doesn't seem to be really raining. However, the wind might be enough to have grounded flights this morning, which will mean more selectees this afternoon, as people switch to later flights.

They restarted the PASS program under the new title, SPOT. No new training for the people who were chosen for it, as far as I can tell, so I think the name is completely politically motivated. They probably didn't want to give people the impression they were going to let bad people through. *eye rolls*

What SPOT does is, they have a few screeners who they trained in recognizing nervous responses in passengers, and they get to specially mark those passengers as selectees. Something I guess they've been doing in Israel for a while, but I guess as far as SPOT is concerned we're one of the pilot program airports. Our Director loves to get us into all the pilot programs.

What it means for me in my own job is that there are 2 less people who are actually on the schedule, making the work a little heavier on everyone else, because those 2 screeners are out in front of the checkpoint interviewing people. Also, we therefore have even more selectees, because we get the chosen ones as well as the ones marked by the computer

Comments

[cygny.livejournal.com]

I see. And do you have sort of worker's union? Can't they demand proper procedures? It's quite a serious matter after all, especially in this day and age.

[derien.livejournal.com]

The management REALLY doesn't want us to have a union. One of my co-workers got written up for "forcing people to join a union." Turned out what she was doing was getting people to sign a birthday card. They're so paranoid.

But, it's not that there aren't 'proper' procedures, it's just that the interpretation of said procedures can differ when you have different managers on (no matter how detailed you write a procedure it's always like that). There's erring on the side of caution, and then there's not looking foolish for 'no' reason.