(b) This is exactly right.

(c) Ah! Now you’ve made a terrible mistake and opened the door to me telling the whole boring story. One TSA guy spotted my toothpaste, shook it, eyed it warily and said “we’ll have to do a volume check on what’s left in here”. I asked if I could just squeeze some out, and he said sure, and I did and it was fine. They busted me for a little pot of surprisingly expensive maple cream (aka maple butter) that I’d gotten to satisfy the request of a friend of a friend and forgotten about. It was about the size of a jar of ladies’ facial cream. When I protested they pointed to the only measurement on the jar to indicate that it’s over the limit, which was in grams. I pointed out that that was stupid and they moved on — to explaining that they can’t open the jar, that sure, I could try dumping some out, but I’d have to go through security again (I said I was happy to do that), but boy, then the x-ray operator will just see it again, and we won’t be able to know how much is in there because we don’t open those things (they had looked into my toothpaste container; only one security line was open, it was inconceivable that anyone else would be dealing with this problem other than the person I was speaking to). I could check it, though! Heck, he’d walk me down to check this single fucking jar of maple candy (at a cost of $20, I believe, for the first checked bag). I explained that I had to catch the last bus back from BWI and was not going to screw around with checked bags, and we kind of went in circles, and I angrily said I could see there was no way for me to win, that he and his cronies were worse than the morons at Syracuse, and I stormed off, no doubt looking like a huge asshole.

The lady next to me really was pleading her case using official TSA literature, for what it’s worth. It was pretty obvious that the guys on duty were just using the wrong limit, but they kept trying to bullshit her, and when she persisted they would just tag out, having the last person who was listening move back to the line and the next person start reciting the same blandishments.