On March 19th, Mike and I flew home from a wonderful ski trip/wedding celebration in Park City, Utah. Mike is a Platinum Rewards flier on Delta and we are usually pleased with their service. We had decided to travel back to Chattanooga a day early because we missed the girls and wanted to get on back home. Plus, we thought it would be easier to get in late Monday rather than late Tuesday since we were both going back to work on Wednesday. So, in an effort to make things "easier", we made a call that ended up making everything much, much more difficult.
We arrived in Chattanooga after 10:30 p.m. We were tired. We were stinky. We were ready to get home. I stood at the baggage carousel while Mike went to retrieve the car. I wondered why he had been the one to leave and go to the car. We noted that one bag alone weighed 65 pounds in the Salt Lake airport. The other bag was at least that big. And we're relying on me to get them? It wouldn't matter, of course, because the bags weren't there. Still, we weren't worried. These things happen all the time. I mean, the fact that any bag reaches its destination in a timely manner is confounding to me. With such tight flight schedules, I don't see how they do it. Well, the answer is - they don't do it. Not always. You may not appreciate the times they do because you are never inconvenienced. But the times your bag doesn't greet you at Baggage Claim, you realize just how important it was that you have your stuff.
So, Mike parked the car in the loading zone and went to file a claim while I waited in the passenger seat. He was gone a while but I didn't think much of it. When I saw him finally approaching the car he was shaking his head and had kind of a concerned look on his face. Not much bothers Mike so I began to worry at his expression. After opening the door he said, "Well, they have no record of our bags". No record? Are you kidding me? In the post 9-11 world we live in, they don't have this down to a science? How do they not have a record?
They had our bags listed as "Pending". This means that they had a record that we claimed to have two bags when we checked in at the Delta kiosk. It also means that they have no record of anything that took place after that. Of course, after we checked in for our flight at the kiosk, we went over to the counter and checked in with the Delta Guy. I'm sure he has a title, but I can't think of anything to call him other than "Mouthbreathing Tardhammer" so I'll just stick with the less-offensive, "Delta Guy". He weighed our bags (hence, the 65 pounds I recalled) and assigned us claim numbers. He then told us that he was attaching our claim tickets to our boarding pass - a key item to remember later in this story. If this had been a movie - a based-on-a-true-story horror movie I may one day pitch - the camera would have tellingly focused in on the stickers that were adhered to the back of our boarding passes; clear foreshadowing that this was something important to remember.
After Delta Guy wished us a safe flight, we walked away - not realizing that we had just possibly seen our dear bags for the very last time. I don't remember saying goodbye. I can't recall if I told them that I loved them and their precious contents. I just ignorantly went on my way without a care in the world. If this had been the horror movie I'll one day write, ominous music would have been playing and Mike and I would have been shown walking away in slow motion having just set in motion a nightmare of epic proportions.
So, when Mike was trying to locate our bags the morning after they went missing, he was told that "Pending" meant that they (Delta) couldn't confirm that we actually had bags at all. Mike (very politely I'm sure) let them know that since we had flown out to Park City a few days earlier with two large bags, it stands to reason that those same two bags would have been with us on the return trip. They begrudgingly acquiesced. They asked him for the claim tickets. Remember those? Well, Mike hadn't remembered them. More specifically, he hadn't remembered where Delta Guy had put them for us - FOR SAFE KEEPING. Mike had done what he always does when he flies (which is about 80 flights a year). He had left his boarding pass on the plane. This is annoying for two reasons. One - it requires that some one else clean up after him. It makes me mad when other people just leave their trash for someone else to have to take care of. I never dreamed my husband would be an offender. And two - it meant that we had no number associated with our bags that we could give the fine people at Delta. We had nothing for them to track. And according to their records, we could have been making the whole thing up! We were told to wait "a few days" and check back in with them. The bags were likely to show up after a day or two. Uh-huh. Yeah. Sure.
They didn't. And Delta didn't seem to care. During the days that followed our flight home, Mike became fond of saying, "The only people who are burning any calories looking for our bags is us". I must have heard that phrase 127 times in those few days. He was right, though. He kept having to call Delta and kept having to re-tell the same story he had told 126 previous times. He would get transferred to this person and that person and none of them had any resolution for us. They were certainly not burning any calories on our behalf. They just kept telling us to wait and see if they showed up.
Weeks went by. We heard nothing from Delta. Every so often - just as a goof - Mike would call and see if there was an update. There wasn't. I missed my bags. I missed my hair products. My four pairs of shoes. My perfume. My good flat iron. My favorite comfy jammies. The Coach purse I had bought and hidden in one of the bags so Mike wouldn't see it or know about it. (And I would have gotten away with it, too. If it hadn't been for
I began to truly believe they were gone forever. Then, in mid-April, I received a strange email from an address I didn't recognize. The person's name was Pilar and she worked at an airport in Santiago, Chile. She had found a bag with my name and address on it.
Our bags had been found!
They were rescued!
As it turns out, they had been found but not necessarily rescued. Pilar clearly was not adept at the English language. From the email which basically read, "We have bag", I could deduce that the airline was not Delta and it was only one bag that had been found. She asked for the case number that we would have been issued from the airline that had (mis)handled our bags and said very little else. I provided the number and sent several frenzied texts to Mike letting him know that holy-shit-they-found-our-bag! Interestingly, that same day, I changed purses from the one I had carried on the trip to a larger, black one. As I was going through my purse, I found a certain boarding pass that had two little stickers on it. Our baggage claim tickets! What are the odds that we had them the whole time? What are the odds that I will be blamed for this? Luckily for me, the name on the claim tickets was "Tom Wilson" - not "Mike" or "Maggie" or "McCallie", so they were of little use. My guess is that Mr. Wilson went to Santiago and our bags were somehow attached to his itinerary.
A few days went by and I did not hear back from Pilar. Mike had called Delta (which burned even more calories) to see what they knew which was- not surprisingly - nothing. So, our bag had been found, we had provided the case number assigned to it once it went missing, and we still were not in possession of the bag. What was going on? Again, in this horror movie which was now my life, more ominous music would have been playing when I got so excited about the contact from Pilar and assumed, stupidly it turned out, that we were going to get this resolved.
I reached out to her again, providing the case number a second time and asked if there was anything else she needed from us. This time, I heard back from her. We emailed back and forth that day. Her emails were very broken - "We need confirm address". "Please we like send you bag". Things like that. But her final email assured me that our bag would be flying from Santiago to Lima, Lima to Atlanta, and finally, Atlanta to Chattanooga. Her estimated delivery date was April 21st.
April 21st came and went. No bag. No email. No calories burned by Delta personnel. This time when Mike called them, they informed him that - oops! - they never activated the case number for our bags and we should wait 4-6 weeks to see if they show up. At this point, all we could do was laugh about it. I mean, EVERYTHING had gone wrong. Surely they don't monumentally screw things up like this every time a bag goes missing. Surely everything was just going wrong for us and this horrendous experience was an anomaly and not indicative of Delta's usual customer service practices.
I can tell you, though, that where I work, whenever we become aware of a person who has had to burn this many calories on an issue either of their own creation or ours, we do everything humanly possible to spare them from having to burn additional calories. We intervene and get things resolved so that they don't have to and so that maybe we can get out of the situation without completely ruining our reputation in their eyes. It's what customer service is. At no point did Delta reach out to us or check in with us. It was just maddening.
A couple of weeks ago on my day off, I got a call from work. My friend Holly said, "I hate to bug you on your day off but this is the Chattanooga airport and you're going to want to talk to him". Throughout this ordeal, I had told many coworkers and friends of our plight. After all, I had to explain why my hair looked the way it did - I had to go out and buy a new flat iron for God's sake! My other one was in Chile! My new flat iron just wasn't in the same class as my old tried-and-true one. Yet another inconvenience of this entire nightmare.
So, I answered the call and spoke to a guy who worked in the baggage department of the Chattanooga airport. He had our bag and wanted to know if I wanted them to deliver it or come and get it myself. Against my better judgement, I said that I wanted it delivered. In the back of my mind, I was thinking that somebody other than Mike or me needed to burn some damn calories over this thing. He told me that I'd get a call around noon and someone would deliver it shortly thereafter. I told him that if I could come through the phone and kiss him, I would. He thought I was weird.
Noon came and went with no phone call. I was driving carpool that day and needed to leave the house at a certain time. I was worried that he'd call while I was away and either a. not deliver the bag or b. deliver it and it would be stolen off of our front porch. So, I called the airport and said if it hadn't yet left, I would come and pick it up. As you might have imagined, the bag hadn't left yet so I was able to go pick it up myself. The process to get the bag from the airport was actually relatively painless which I had not been expecting due to the fact that to this point I was conditioned to expect the very worst. A Delta employee brought the bag out to me and it looked just as it had when I left it those many, many days ago. I dragged it through the airport and heaved all 65 pounds of it into my trunk.
When I was able to go through it at home, all of the contents were accounted for (except, mysteriously, my underwear which I'm just going to assume were packed in the other bag because... gross) and everything seemed fine. A happy ending (finally) to an almost two month saga. Again, though, I'll point out that our other bag - filled with ski jackets and clothes and accessories we've been collecting for over ten years has yet to appear. I'm thinking it's vacationing in Yemen by now.
Later that evening, I poured a glass of wine, and had some alone time with my newly recovered bag.
... while somewhere in Chile a man named Eduardo was rolling around in my underwear no doubt.
