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From After: How America Confronted The September 12 Era

Gale Rossides came home from her first day as the new something -- no one had any titles yet -- at the Transportation Security Administration and told her husband it had been twelve hours of "indescribable chaos." No one had desks, chairs, phones, or computers, let alone any idea of their responsibilities. She bounced around from meeting to meeting, although these were more conversations or encounters than meetings, since they happened spontaneously around a vacant desk or in the tenth-floor hallway of the Transportation Department's white-box, ugly building. Only Magaw seemed to have an office. Sitting outside it in a converted closet was Stephen McHale, who was supposed to be TSA head Magaw's deputy and whom Rossides knew from ATF, where he'd been Magaw's general counsel.

For someone who had spent every day of the twenty-three years of her working life in the same government agency, this might have been Rossides's way of explaining to her spouse why she thought she had made a terrible mistake. But Rossides had loved it. Everything about it gave her the feeling of having been swept away into a group of warriors fighting on an important front in the new home front war.

Even the groups of seemingly know-it-all private sector hotshots, who were running all those go teams she heard about only after she arrived ("who are the guys with all the laptops," she wondered), didn't bother her. The charts full of deadlines and milestones they'd taped along the walls of a conference room that they'd converted into their war room, and all their lists, and lists of lists, made it seem like these guys had everything so well under control that they didn't need her. They cheerfully disabused her of that, welcoming her, clearing a desk for her in the war room, and pushing her to join the fray. They needed help and really didn't have anything solved yet. If it looked like they'd been working here for years, that was only because "TSA time," one of them told her, was something akin to dog years only more so: In terms of how fast they had to move, a day was like a month and a month was like a year. In fact, most of them had started only a few weeks ago.

Rossides had jumped into a budget meeting, agreed to join an organizational structure committee, and begun working with the go team that was a week or two ahead of her on trying to figure out how to recruit and train all those new federal baggage screeners.

By the end of the day, she felt like she'd been there a week or two. The go team guy was right about TSA time and dog years.

Copyright © 2003 by Steven Brill