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Check, please: I am a "road warrior," traveling three weeks out of the month. I am a premium customer on American and Delta, but I am always pulled out for extra security on United. I am a 61-year-old white-bread multi-generation American. I asked a United customer service rep to explain this and was told to call up George Bush and ask him. What can I do?

— Bill Gordon, Fountain Valley, Calif.

Answer: Say the name "Bill Gordon." Then say the name "Khalid Shaikh Mohammed." Notice how similar they are?

You didn't?

Neither did Bill Gordon, but somewhere, somehow, someone named Bill Gordon has gotten himself on a watch list that suggests he may be trouble.

In a subsequent conversation with Gordon, I learned that he also had been pulled aside on other airlines and that he had gone through the Department of Homeland Security's Travel Redress Inquiry Program, a procedure that helps clear one's name. The Transportation Security Administration's website ( www.tsa.gov ) says this program "is a central gateway to address watch list misidentification issues," among other things.

It worked for every airline but United. Gordon still gets pulled aside.

And, apparently, he also gets ridiculed for asking a very logical question: What can I do to stop this?

Robin Urbanski, a United representative, didn't address Gordon's problem specifically but says she is disappointed in the customer service rep's response. I am too.

If this were truly customer service, the rep would have given George Bush's home number to Gordon. It's (202) 456-1414, by the way, but patience may be a better alternative than contacting the president.

The airlines are merely doing what they were told to do almost a decade ago when the computer-assisted passenger screening system was implemented. Each carrier uses its own criteria.

The TSA hopes to take over the system beginning, it hopes, in 2008 (which it will call Secure Flight), and perhaps with that takeover will come some consistency.

And even if consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative, as Oscar Wilde said, I'd rather be dull than consistently dragged out of line.

Have a travel dilemma? Send an e-mail to travel@latimes.com.