They probably shouted at her for the best part of an hour.
Sounds like current TSA procedure, amped up a few degrees.
No, I'm not being a smarty-pants. When one's country is compared to Communist Yugo-friggin-slavia it's time to pay attention.
Sounds like current TSA procedure, amped up a few degrees.
No, I'm not being a smarty-pants. When one's country is compared to Communist Yugo-friggin-slavia it's time to pay attention.
While I agree with what you were trying to say, that was really uncalled for.
Although I doubt that his experience had much to do with the Cold War, but rather the internal pre-breakup tensions, war and the Kosovo/Serbia thing during the time.
You might say it's our own damn fault, you might say my parents' generation and mine are to blame, I won't argue about that.
You may criticize the communism, the backwater mentality, the ingrained sense of entitlement and lots of other things about (ex-)Yugoslavia. A lot of that stuff is the reason why I left.
But please, keep it civil, for the sake of us poor schmucks that loved growing up in that place and then left it, disappointed.
Sorry you got your feelings hurt.
BTW a friend of mine actually bought a Yugo. We made fun of it at the time, but in terms of gas mileage and how much he paid for it, it was a big winner.
By putting "friggen" into the middle of a word, you're verbally underlining / emphasizing it. Really emphasizing it, as is underlining it multiple times.
For instance, in the movie Pretty Woman, when one of the two friends is trying to figure out someone for whom a relationship worked out, she responds with "Cinder-friggen-rella". ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100405/quotes?qt0466870 )
I know this is an overly-long response to a minor issue, but I just didn't want you thinking that someone was making fun of your country. Instead, I believe the person who originally said it was essentially trying to say "a really, really, really communist country" had a more appealing entry system than today's America.
Thanks!
And I'm off to wikipedia for a while. It's Friday night and I just learned something - the weekend is off to a great start.
When my father tried to escape from the East Bloc, he was arrested by Communist troops in Slovenia. The commander in charge of the local troop deployment interrogated him and decided that he wasn't a threat to the state. He put my father back on the road and told him to walk.
My father said to him: "I know how this works. You'll let me walk for a few steps and then you'll shoot me."
The commander said "No, I'm not going to shoot you. Go."
Sometimes, my father would tear up talking about it. That sort of thing did happen.
I worked in a defense industry in 80s/90s and sometimes we had to visit Eastern Europe.
We were carefully briefed about not carrying any company documents or the early laptops because they might be seized or copied at immigration. We should be careful about anything we said on the phone since calls may monitored and we should expect to be grilled on arrival for some imagined paperwork error.
Now I work for a european aerospace/defense company - and the rules on visiting America are MUCH stricter.
Your company's rules for visiting the US today are really stricter than the rules for visiting Eastern Europe in the 80s/90s?
In theory - my knowledge of the problems we had making the obsolete GR2 Tornado's radar work would have been useful to the Russian IF there had been a WWIII, and if they didn't already know. And that the East Germans might have passed it on if I had been silly enough to carry all my technical reports with me to Berlin in the 80s
But my current phone has a list of all the calls/emails to my company's component suppliers and many customers and potential customers along with price and delivery info.
We compete and in some cases also partner with US aerospace companies that the US undoubtedly consider vital for it's national defense.
I am pretty confident that if the TSA copied my phone or laptops's contents - while looking for terrorist plots or MP3s and handed it over to the NSA or whoever. Then if they found info that could be of commercial value to Boeing/Lockheed Martin/Raytheon etc then the NSA are not going to be prevented from passing those on by a sense politeness to a foreign visitor!
That's why I get a clean wiped 'travel' laptop and a dumb phone to take, I use a VPN to check my email and I don't chat on a cell phone about how which US airlines are thinking of not buying Boeing.