Bowman gave me some sage advice before I left for Detroit.
“Do *not* check any bags. They lost my bag and never found it. It was miserable,” he says.
It was with a smug confidence in technology that I checked my bag in Baton Rouge before flying to Detroit with a connection in Houston. All luggage is bar-coded now, how can they possibly lose bags? With all the attention paid to terrorist threats, luggage inspections, etc. Just plain losing a bag seems like it shouldn’t happen, right?
I shared the fully packed flight from Houston to Detroit with about 20 ultra Christian teenagers from Alabama who were starting a church field trip. Three girls, about 13 or 14 years old, sat in front of me. Snippets from their conversations during the flight include:
“Megan you shouldn’t play those games [she was playing Animal Crossing on a Nintendo DS] because they don’t glorify God.”
“What’s the movie? Just My Luck? Uggggh, I can’t watch that because Lindsay Lohan is in it. I don’t like her because she used to make really nice movies for Disney but then she wanted to start being all skanky so she sued Hollywood so she could stop making movies for Disney so she could be a skank.”
When the flight attendants told us to turn off portable electronic devices one of the girls said, “Wouldn’t it be cool if *people* had an on/off switch? We could turn ourselves off and not worry about anything. Oh, wait. How would we turn ourselves back on?” Pause while they all consider the question. Then one of them says, “Oh wait, GOD would turn us back on!”
I did my best to drown them out with my headphones and liberally applied volume, but those are a few of the things I accidentally heard while changing playlists.
The plane landed, I headed over to the luggage pickup to wait for my bag. So I waited. And waited. And waited. I waited so long that by the time I realized something was amiss, everyone was gone and there were no bags left. I still didn’t want to admit that my luggage had been lost, so I waited some more. When people from another flight started gathering to get their luggage, I gave up and headed over to the lost baggage office.
No big deal, I thought to myself. With all these cool new technologies, the agent should be able to tell me exactly where my bag is. I give her my info, which she punches into an ancient looking terminal. She looked at the terminal like a dog looks at a calculus problem– confused and uninterested. She said, “Well, I can’t tell if your bag made it on to the plane or not.”
“But…the technology? The barcode?” I plead, pointing at my luggage pick-up receipt with the matching barcode to my now evidently lost bag.
“Oh, they never scan the bags. Those barcodes don’t mean anything.”
I was given a phone number to call in 24 hours to check the status and an online tracking number that I could use to track the bag. When I asked the lady how the fuck an online tracking number would help if SHE COULDN’T TRACK MY FUCKING BAG, she gave me that dog-looking-at-the-calculus-problem look. So I left.
October 7th, 2006 at 2:06 pm
Sorry to hear you lost your bag……Its sort of the same in the UK, except without the barcodes, and much more standing around in a static line for 4 hours whilst the woman in front has to empty her baby change bag, and have everybody taste the baby food to make sure it is what the label says.
November 28th, 2006 at 7:37 am
Sounds like she may have been using windows…….
I saw this and thought of you:
They say when you play that Microsoft CD backward you can hear satanic messages … but that’s nothing. If you play it forward it will install Windows