LAX sucks. Big hairy ugly things.

Man, LAX sucks. Big hairy ugly things.

Pretty much every day, four or five big planes land at LAX at around 7:30am-ish local time. This fact should not take them by surprise. And yet they are manifestly ill-prepared to deal with 1500 people arriving at once. They have dozens upon dozens of customs officer booths, yet only have ten of them manned, and even then, the shift seems to start at 8am.

With six carousels all in use, the bags from some of the smaller flights are to be collected from the floor between carousels. (Let's not mention that if they processed people through customs a touch more efficiently, they wouldn't end up with such a hideous backlog in baggage collection.)

Then, once you've collected your luggage (or not, in my case), you then queue again to get through their perfunctory quarantine processing. And, by then you've used up half of the hour-and-a-half changeover time.

But then the fun really begins. You make your way up to the connecting passengers area, get your name ticked off, assure them that you don't need to check your luggage, and make your way up two floors, and into the cavernous departures hall of LAX international.

Foolishly (in hindsight) I went to the first security screening gate. Like everyone else. Now you recall that I exited a secure area only three minutes earlier, two floors down. But rather than take advantage of that simple fact, we have to go all the way out so we can go all the way back in.

First you queue up and wait to be assessed by the first dude (trying too hard to be avuncular, but hey, he at least smiles at you). Then, in the tiny space available, you have to queue to go through the xray screening. Australia is quite happy for you to show your liquids bag, and walk through the metal detector. As is almost everywhere else I've been to that isn't LAX.

No. Here you have to take off your shoes and your belt and your watch and your necklace. You have to put your laptop/iPad/Kindle in it's own tray. You, of course, need to put out your dinky little bag of liquids, plus empty water bottle (which three different people will shake to check it's empty).

And then you wait while four other people and their four trays each are pushed through in front of you. Then you feed your bag and four trays into the machine, before going into the rude-bits-photo-booth. And you try not to bitch and moan too loudly so as to avoid drawing unnecessary attention to yourself. So that process takes another half hour.

So you now have five minutes to walk the length of the departure gate corridors, as your plane is scheduled to leave in ten. And while I was pretty confident they'd hold the plane, (and I knew there were others behind me, and some who looked at the customs guy funny and got sixteen additional questions, and so on), I didn't really want to risk it.

And yes they did hold the plane. And yes we're leaving twenty minutes late.

On the other hand, New York, here I come!