So I went to Chicago this weekend. I flew Southwest into Midway, a great flying experience overall. I’d never flown into Midway before, and its a great little airport that’s right close to downtown. Highly recommend it.

Southwest just started flying out of Boston, and as a result, they’re the only airline flying domestic flights out of the nominally International E terminal. I suspect that is why this section of the airport had those full body scanner naked picture machines installed, instead of the normal metal detectors.

So despite the airport being pretty non-crowded (is there an opposite word for crowded?), the line to go through security was painfully slow. It’s probably accurate to say they take 3-5 times as long to get through as the normal machines. You have to stand with your legs apart and your hands on your head while the machine renders a 3-D image of your naked body. Oh sure, the signs tell you your privacy is assured, but I don’t believe it.

Its only a matter of time before a cache of these images winds up online. I watched as a father and his 13 yr old son went through the machines in front of me. I couldn’t help but think that these machines make being an airline screener a pedophile’s dream job. I cringed as I watched the 13 yr old spread his legs and pose for the naked picture. I’m reminded of the posture photos that were taken of college kids back in the 1960′s. I never understood how people were convinced to pose for those things. And yet they did, in the thousands. History repeats itself I guess.

In any event, I requested the pat-down. I believe I told the TSA woman I didn’t want nude photos taken, and would like the pat-down. They had me walk through the machine to the other side, where I received a lengthy pat down from a man. I was annoyed that they wouldn’t walk me around the machine, but I didn’t put up a fuss about it. Maybe I should have. I assume that it wasn’t scanning anything as I walked through. During the pat-down, they asked me if I had anything in my pockets, and I told them my wallet was in my pocket. I didn’t put it through the scanner because it was full of money. A different TSA agent took my wallet and thumbed through it in front of me and handed it back to me, telling me to hold it out while I got the pat-down. The TSA agent who did teh pat-down must have been 25 or so, and he seemed nervous and maybe a little embarrassed doing it. He wore rubber gloves, and literally patted ever inch of me other than my junk, because terrorists would never hide a bomb there. In any event, it eventually ended and I gathered my things and proceeded to my gate. Oddly enough, they never put me through the metal detector.

These machines are seriously stupid and need to be removed. While I was the only person requesting the pat-down, I was not the only person annoyed. The father of the 13 year old told the TSA agent that they either needed to figure out how to be more efficient with these machines or they needed to go. And it generally seemed that everyone in line was annoyed with the process. I’m going to take a wild guess and say these machines get dumped in a landfill in a year or so, but what do I know. I would have thought that Sarbanes Oxley would have been repealed by now after it single-handedly killed the IPO market, but it lives on. Maybe congress will double down and force everybody through the machines and eliminate the pat-down option, as they’ve done in London.