Travel Woes Saga Part II

Of course United lost my suitcase. Or, to be more precise, they failed to put it on the plane. When I arrived at my final destination of Colorado Springs, and went to retrieve my suitcase from the carousel, 't'weren't there. There was another, exactly like mine -- I even pulled it off the carousel, thinking it was mine -- but the name on the tag was not Normancamp (airlines can't do hyphens). Later, when there was no sign of another big, dark blue bag, and no one had yet claimed this big blue bag -- and all the waiting passengers had faded away -- in desperation I unzipped the case and took a peek inside. But no, those thick, nicely folded sweaters were definitely not mine. And yes, it was time to get in the Lost Baggage line. Anyone who has had this happen will know how my heart sank.

This was at about 2 p.m. on Sunday. The woman said the earliest the suitcase would be in was 8 that night, but by the way she said it, I knew the bag would not be in until the following day, if then. (At the time she wasn't even sure where the case was; all she could say for sure was that there "was no record of its having left Portland.")

In the event, I didn't get my suitcase until 9 p.m. on Christmas Eve, but which time I'd missed the church service my sister, brother and I were supposed to attend together (I'm not a religious person at all, but my two siblings are, and attending a Christmas Eve service with them was something I had actually been rather looking forward to, especially as Ellen's church goes in in a big way for beautiful music -- but they went while I waited for the suitcase to be delivered), and had to go to the lovely Christmas Eve dinner at the very nice Broadmoor Hotel -- something we'd all been looking forward to -- in an outfit cobbled together from odds and ends from my sister's closet and jewelry box.

This latter development was especially upsetting for me. My life pretty much fits into the Never-Goes-Anywhere-or-Does-Anything category -- certainly I never go anywhere where I get to Dress Up, which is actually something I enjoy doing -- and here was my big chance, and the outfit I'd carefully put together...which included a new pair of black velvet pants I had painstakingly hemmed the day before leaving, and a red glittery top that I love but never have occasion to wear...it was lying in my suitcase, on some delivery truck that had supposedly left the airport at 1 p.m., but as of 5:30 p.m. when we had to leave to make our dinner reservation, had still not put in an appearance.

I made numerous irate phone calls during the course of the afternoon/evening -- a very pleasant aspect of Christmas Eve, needless to say -- to the inevitable 800 number with people with heavy East Indian accents assuring me that they would be glad to check on that for me. Finally, when we returned from our dinner at almost 9 p.m., and the bag had still not been delivered, I called and told the fellow, "In a town this size they could have delivered 200 suitcases in the 8 hours that have expired since I was first told my bag had left the airport and was on its way to the address I had indicated." The fellow went away to "contact the baggage delivery service," came back and said someone from that company would "personally deliver the bag to me within 10 minutes." I went outside in the freezing cold and walked up and down in front of Ellen's garage to keep the motion-activated light coming on so that no one could miss the big address numbers on her garage. When this fellow in a private automobile showed up I was astounded, expecting a delivery truck. He told me he'd personally "rescued" my bag from the delivery truck (no doubt because of all the calls I kept making), and seemed to think I should be mighty grateful. "I've been waiting 8 hours for this bag to be delivered!" I exclaimed. "Well, I'm sorry, ma'm, but we had over 700 parcels to deliver. And some people have been waiting weeks for their bags."

WHAT?! I had assumed that what was being delivered were however few (one would hope) suitcases United had managed to lose in the past, say, 24 hours. I had figured maybe 50 or 60 bags, tops. But Bag.com was delivering bags that had been shipped, rather than just bags that weren't on the baggage carousel when they were supposed to be. 700 of them! God only knows when I would have received my bag, if I hadn't been the proverbial squeaky wheel.

Since these two recent trips of mine, with all their various problems and frustrations, I have discovered that United has a terrible reputation for baggage handling, flights not being on-time, and customer service in general. Now I find out! Well, now I've seen it all up close and personal, and the disgusted letter is on its way to United CEO Jeff Smisek.

And we haven't even gotten to my homeward connecting flight being cancelled, and my having to "overnight in Chicago."