Why did this happen? (air travel question - not rhetorical).

Note: If you’d like to share similar frustrations and questions, would you post them in the “Air Travel Inconsistencies and Absurdities” thread ( https://www.democraticunderground.com/10181199617 )? I’m really looking for answers in this thread.

We had reservations on an Iberia flight (flown by Level airlines). I went to the Iberia site, entered info like passport numbers and birth dates and printed out our boarding passes. When we got to the airport (Logan in Boston), at the entrance to security the agent ran our pass through his machine and a light green light went on. He told us we needed to go back to the ticket counter because the light was “jello.” I honestly didn’t understand what he was talking about and kept asking him to repeat. At that point the woman at the next location came over and said she’d go ask the supervisor. She came back and said the supervisor said if the light wasn’t “dark green” we had to get new boarding passes at the ticket counter. She walked us all the way back, asked where Iberia was and took us to a ticket counter labeled “Level,” (more about that in “Air Travel Inconsistencies and Absurdities”). She took us to the head of the line, but the ticket agent said we had to go to the back of a VERY LONG line “because lots of other people have the same problem.”

When we finally got to the ticket counter we asked the agent why this had all happened. She said that for flights leaving the country the passport has to be checked three times, once at the ticket counter, once at security, and once at the gate. Here are my questions.

The main one: Why did this happen?

Then, if the explanation of the ticket agent is correct (3 checks needed when leaving the country) then….

- Why did Iberia issue me a boarding pass in the first place?

- Why was the security scanner set up to scan some boarding passes dark green and some “jello” (light green)? We were in an international only terminal.

- Why did the one security agent treat us like an exception if “lots of other people had the same problem.”