I was in Hawaii for a friend's wedding in Oahu, and afterward went to Kauai for the week. We had an inter-island flight back from Kauai to the Honolulu airport on Island Air on a propeller plane. Its only a 30m flight and I was excited to be on a prop plane, but the noise and vibration made me nauseous after about 20m and all I wanted to do was be on the ground again.
When the plane landed it was too small to connect to the jetway so we were escorted across the tarmac to a door where we waited for instructions on what to do. Some people were leaving the airport, some people were transfering to another Island Air flight and some, like us, were transferring to a different airline. The options seemed hazy, we could stay on this side of security and get shuttled to the next terminal by the host, or leave and take the bus outside but it wasn't clear if this applied to all transfers.
After waiting around for a few minutes without much happening one guy talked to the host about continuing on with a different airline and the host told him to go through the doors to the bus. After some hesitation we decided to follow. I walked through the open door and then stopped inside, literally inches from the threshhold. I turned to confirm with the host if this is what we were supposed to do.
He said we could go that way but we'd have to reenter security or take the shuttle and check in at the counter. I definitely didn't want to do that so I stepped back outside. He continued, "but you can't take the shuttle anymore because you've stepped through the door". That was it. We had crossed the magic boundary and now we could not come back, even though we we're already outside again. He told us he'd be fined and we had no choice but to go back through the door and go through security again. He had watched us the whole time, didn't stop us, didn't warn us, didn't give any explaination and now 1) we couldn't backtrack two feet 2) because a terrorist could have snuck a bomb to us in the hallway he watched us step into. Talk about sensless regulation.