Being a TSA officer is a dream job for sadistic sociopaths, but for people who are able to sympathize, it’s a nightmare. “I hated it from the beginning,” writes former TSA officer Jason Edward Harrington, in an essay published in Politico Magazine. He recounts about the daily shame of having to confiscate nail clippers from pilots (to prevent the pilots from using them to “hijack the very planes they were flying”), jars of homemade apple butter (“on the pretense that they could pose threats to national security”) and a bottle of champagne from some Marines returning home from Afghanistan who wanted to share it with a young soldier who’d lost his legs to an I.E.D.

He also admits everyone at the TSA “knew the [$150,000] full-body scanners didn’t work before they were even installed.”

Read more here Former TSA officer reveals widespread misery there