Letters / ‘Horrible behaviour’
Flying from Sumburgh to Edinburgh last week, I experienced horrible behaviour from security staff.
I was wearing a shirt over a tee shirt, and the security man told me to take off my shirt. When I protested that it was a shirt, his response was ‘I don’t care what it is, take it off’.
He then told me to take off my watch; a first in my experience of hundreds of thousands of miles of air travel.
I explained that that was unnecessary because I would be searched anyway, because both of my knees are metal. He just insisted that I take it off.
When I asked him if it was necessary to be so obnoxious, his response was ‘Yes, it is in my nature’.
I recounted this tale over dinner to a friend in Bath. She is a very respectable grandmother but, on leaving Shetland a few years ago was ordered down to her bra and pants, and searched, because security staff at Sumburgh refused to believe that she had metal plates in her skull, her shoulder and her hips.
What a departing memory of Shetland to have. Can we please train these people to behave like human beings, and remind them that they play an important part in creating an image of Shetland?
Alan Skinner
Cullivoe
