TRAVEL THERE: THE BEST LAID PLANS OF MICE, MEN AND WOMEN ARE AT THE MERCY OF THE AIRLINES
Why Detroit?
So, with a world of destinations to choose from, why go to Detroit? The short answer is family. Another short answer would be Great Niece/Nephew Gender Reveal. My answer would be, take me anywhere, I’ll find something to do.
Anyway, our nephew and his wife in California are having a baby, most of Bill’s family have immigrated from Egypt to the Detroit area and many others immigrated to Canadian cities not far from Detroit. We do have some family here in Dallas, but we are few. Instead of taking everyone out to California, the expecting parents joined everyone else in Michigan.
Anxiety Free Departure
I love to travel, but for the last few years, leaving home meant taking along our business. The added stress before we left, and managing things remotely while we were gone, took a real dent out of my fun, but just before this trip we sold our real estate photography company. There’s a certain amount of stress that comes with travel for anyone, but compared to those days when I also had to carry the burden of the business, I was blissfully un-harassed.
The day of the trip, we discovered our flight was running about 30 minutes late, but that didn’t faze us. In fact, it gave us just a little extra wiggle room. Things went like clockwork at the Park N Fly lot and their shuttle delivered us at the terminal. We dropped off our one checked bag and strolled up to security. Things were great!
At security, something went awry and they closed down our line. They gave us two choices. One was to go outside, walk 10 minutes to the next entrance, go through security and then walk back down to our gate, which would be about another 10 minute walk. Or we could wait. They weren’t sure what the hold up was or how long it would take, but we had time and we were next in line, so we took our chances.
In less time than it would have taken us to walk down to the next entrance, they opened things back up and we sailed through security. So, we were running into some problems and issues, but they were so minor they didn’t even count. We grabbed some lunch at Smash Burger and by the time we were through, our flight was boarding.
The Real Trouble Begins
One we were in our seat, we discovered the flight was having some maintenance issues. They started with an announcement that it should be about 10 minutes before we would take up, but they kept pushing that further until we were about an hour later than scheduled. We’re not thrilled at this point. I had hoped for a little sightseeing in the Riverfront area when we got to Detroit, but we’d still be fine, right?
As we sat at the gate, Bill tries to set up the free wi-fi on his phone, so he can watch the a movie. I was a little concerned at this point. A young man behind me was helping out a couple of older ladies get their phones set up to do the same and their experience was not sounding at all like Bill’s. His connection was asking for a credit card and when the first one didn’t work, he put in another one. Very, very bad move.
Almost immediately, he gets a text from one of the credit card companies letting him know his credit card had been compromised. This is not good. It was even worse when we got to our hotel room and they informed him the second card had been hacked. While this was inconvenient and would interrupt our bookkeeping, we were OK. I had another credit card with me which I use for limited special transactions, so we were still in business and even if that were not so, we had debit cards.
The worst thing was yet to come. The message boards in baggage claim were not working and by the time we figured out where we were supposed to be, the only thing riding around on the carousel was one purple bag, but it wasn’t MY purple bag.
The Lost Luggage Saga
There were three individuals at the Lost Luggage Desk. One was a young man who had already pissed Bill off with his cavalier attitude about the deceiving message boards. We had been standing by the carousel which promised to deliver our bag, but of course, it was not the right one. Bill was not happy, at all, that we’d been wasting our time waiting at the wrong carousel, but the guy didn’t even pretend to care. In sort of a sing-song nanny-nanny-poo-poo voice he chided Bill for not hearing the multiple announcements they made. In Bill’s defense, there were some announcements, but they’d sort of sounded like, “mwah bwah napa bwah mwah nwah…” You get my drift.
The second person, a woman, pissed me off. Because all that was left on the carousel was a piece of purple luggage about the same size as mine, it led us to assume mine had been picked up by mistake. At first, the lady took several appropriate steps to contact the owner of the bag. That made me feel better.
Then she started in on her everything’s-all-right mantra. The first 10 or 12 times she tried to convince me of that, I figured it was just her job, but it became irritating. My luggage was a virtually new American Tourister bag. What had been left behind was a beat-up off-brand. When she said, “They don’t want your stuff,” I figured she had no clue. I have good stuff and whenever I do leave an item behind in other situations, it is way gone, even when I return fairly quickly. Comparing the left behind bag to mine, I thought there was a good chance they might actually want my stuff.
The third person came along about the time I was ready to punch Ms. Everything’s-All-Right. She talked to the lady whose contact information was on the bag and discovered it was her son who had picked up the wrong bag, but he was somewhere on an Uber and his phone was out of juice.
Ms. Number Three acknowledged that everything was not alright and gave me a form which entitled me up to $3500 worth of replacements, were they unable to connect me with my bag before the evening was over. She suggested we go ahead and get our rental car while they figured out how to contact the young man in the Uber.
And that’s where I will leave you for now. Come back next week to discover if I actually got my luggage back or whether I went on a shopping spree with my $3500 replacement money!
jane sadek 