It may just matter which airline you choose to fly on some day, if you ever have an experience like Michelle Bearden. Michelle had her purse stolen on a trip to Phoenix and lost ALL her identification. She had a real identity crisis and it almost kept her from making it back home to Tampa. The most interesting part of the story to me was that even though the TSA requires a match of IDs to boarding passes, they allow each individual airline to make their own determination of how to handle passengers without a valid ID. Lucky for Michelle that Joe Hodas, spokesperson for Frontier, the airline she was traveling on, wasn't taking tickets that day. Joe's comment was, "I'm surprised she got on the flight". Frontier must be so proud of Joe.

On a recent trip my boss asked why I had a spare driver's license in my bag. I joked that it was because I was dead serious about high-availability and fault-tolerance. Now I'm thinking it isn't such a dumb idea after all. As many things as I've lost when I travel, I better call American and find out their no-ID policy right away.

The article also mentioned there are no stats on this problem, but I would hope that something of this nature doesn't encourage RFIDing humans. I know we've been doing that with pets for a while and I'm sure you're all as excited as I am that June 2005 is National Microchipping Month. However, I'm not quite interested in one for myself yet. I'll just hang loose in Phoenix.