TSA Agent Not Sure DC Driver's License Counts as Valid ID
Every year around Christmastime, some cousins, friends, and I partake in a bar crawl around our hometown. The first year, this included the local strip club (located behind the town's public library, because we're classy like that). But when we tried to return the following year, the elderly barmaid/bouncer refused to let me in. Everyone else she would allow, but she was certain it was illegal for Ohio drinking establishments to accept a Washington, D.C., driver's license as valid identification. And though we tried to reason with her—I had just come from the bar across the street, which seemed to find my ID perfectly acceptable—this lady was nothing doing.
I bring this up because one might assume an official agent of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) would be smarter than your average 70-year-old barkeep at an Ohio strip club. But then one would assume wrong. In what is surely my favorite tale of TSA incompetence in recent memory, a TSA agent at the Phoenix airport didn't think that D.C. drivers' licenses counted as valid ID, owing to the fact that D.C. isn't a real state.
According to the Washington Post, D.C. resident Ashley Brandt was attempting to fly home last week when she ran into a little glitch going through security. After taking a look at her D.C. license, a TSA agent told her, "I don't know if we can accept these." Did Brandt perhaps have real identification, like a U.S. passport, with her?
"She didn't seem to know that it was basically the same as a state ID," Brandt told the Post. "The whole thing was kind of ridiculous and strange. Apparently in Arizona, they're not sure we're all right."
The befuddled agent called out to a manager, who assured her that, yes, the TSA does accept D.C. licenses as identification. Now if only someone could convince that bartender for me …
(H/T Boing Boing)