TSA Battery Clusterfuck

I can understand doing things for “safety” but please… exploding camera batteries? AA’s? A limit of two spares? Absolutely Ridiculous.

Not to mention the most confusing conditions of any rule or requirement I’ve ever heard of… “Total aggregate equivalent lithium content in grams” Yeah, let me get out my goddamn scale and calculator and and figure out how many grams and watt-hours are in all the batteries I’m taking. What the hell? Read their arcane press release and tell me if YOU can make sense of it… and then try to imagine explaining how many grams of lithium are in your batteries or whether or not your batteries are “lithium”, or “lithium-ion” to a member of the TSA goon squad:

http://www.tsa.gov/travelers/airtravel/assistant/batteries.shtm

http://safetravel.dot.gov/whats_new_batteries.html

John Harrington has made pretty good sense of it all, but I still think I’ll just be UPS/FedEx-ing my batteries ahead to wherever I’m staying.