Of course, if Santa were depending on United to make his rounds on Christmas Eve, there’d be a revolt of present-less, disappointed nice girls and boys. Nevertheless, on Friday, I clambored aboard yet another UA flight, this time for four short days with the family in Maryland. I don’t particularly like flying around the holidays. I’m always crazed busy, people around me have high anxiety, and the airlines….. Well, I’m getting to that.
I had already said (repeatedly) that I wasn’t going to Maryland, despite the ever-hopeful inviting (repeatedly) by the Admiral and various (read: All) members of my family. The tipping point was tickets to the Redskins-Cowboys game on Sunday. It is very difficult to pass up a chance to cheer against Tony Romo in person. That, on top of the realization that this could be the last time the entire family gathers for Christmas (my brother’s kids are starting to scatter), convinced me to relent (as the Admiral no doubt fully expected. He is, after all, an admiral).
Even before the trip began , there were harbingers of horror yet to come. For the second time in about 20 years, a massive ice storm hit Salt Lake Thursday. A plane slid off the runway, the airport closed down, and power went out throughout the city… When I got to SLC the next morning at SIX AM, people were sleeping all over the terminal. That is never a good sign.
Then, I noticed I only had 30-minutes to make my connection in Denver. Now, hold the phone on this. On a good day, there’s little hope of making this connection, particularly in Denver. Since when did this kind of scheduling happen? I thought the minimum time for turnaround was 45-minutes. You know what’s coming. Well, actually, you probably don’t.
Everyone boarded the sold-out plane, but we sat and sat and sat. Then the flight attendants walked to the back of the plane and escorted three very unmerry holiday travellers off the plane. I overheard one of them angrily asking how the hell they were going to find her bags in the baggage compartment. Uh oh. Turns out, someone put too much fuel in the plane, so they had to lighten the load. Somehow, some brainiac calculated that those three people and their luggage equalled the exact amount of ballast that needed to come off, to keep us from falling into Illinois. How. Does. This. Happen? Want to know how long this all took? Longer than I had to make my connection in Denver. But I still tried. I ran like a bat out of hell in my Uggs, schlepping a giant ahopping bag of presents and my backpack for FORTY GATES. The plane was still there, but the agent wouldn’t let me on, of course. My choices were to fly into Baltimore 9 hours from then or fly into the black hole of Dulles in 30 minutes. I chose Dulles, suitcase with Christmas presents be damned. Which it was.
My poor sister-in-law had to drive an extra 45 minutes in rush hour traffic to get me, now that I was flying to Virginia instead of around the corner to Baltimore.. Aaaannd, my bag was not there. (Duh) The poor woman who had ten people without bags standing in line cheerfully said my bag was “probably” on the next flight from Denver, coming in in 20 minutes. But she said not to wait, as it would be another 45 til the bag got to the carousel, being Dullard, I mean Dulles Airport and all. So I took the baggage locator papers and left with Sheryl. We got to my nephew Chris’s Sherwood HS basketball game in time to see a heartbreaking loss. Then I started working on tracking my bag down.
The first problem is that you are supposed to enter the 10-digit and letter tracking code to find your bag on the “wheresmysuitcase.com website. (Seriously.) For some reason, I have two codes. One has nine characters. The other has 11. The fact that I have two codes is worrisome in and of itself. For the next few hours, I’m told that my bag has been picked up, hasn’t been picked up, and will be delivered by 1 am. Being on MST, I’m wide awake, so my night owl niece, Katy, and I chat and wait. I don’t really want my bag to sit on the front step all night, even though it is a great neighborhood. You know all those crazy college kids are home and who knows what they’d do! (cue the curmudgeony adult monologue.) Katy bails around 2am, just when my nephew, Matt, comes home. We chat and wait. He bails around 3:30. I check on the website and automated phone line again. The bag has been picked up, hasn’t been picked up, and will be delivered by 4. But now, there’s a phone number for the driver on an email. I call; he doesn’t answer. There’s a map for the GPS locator on his car on the website, though, and it shows him at an Absolute Sound store in some Maryland town I’ve never heard of. Whaaaat??? I call the United customer service line (in Mumbai), and surprise!!! Now my bag will be delivered in the morning (a statement the agent obviously made up. When I questioned him further, he couldn’t back it up. Then he insisted on calling the driver. Surprise!!!! No answer!).
The driver actually called me back at 3:45 am and said it had been a long day, he’d be at the house at 6 am and would call when he got there. Why couldn’t they have him do that in the first place?? Then I started thinking it might not be my bag coming after all this, since the tracking numbers didn’t match,. Also, United had managed to lose one of the Admiral’s bags the same day, coming in from Honolulu. (You can’t make this stuff up.. And it gets better/worse.) But the phone rang at 6:05 and it was my bag at the door. The Admiral’s lost bag came a day later.
I had a great three days in Maryland that included a Washington Capitals game (they lost by one), a Redskins game (they lost by one… Curse you, Tony Romo!), and watching the Ravens LOSE (by waaaay more than one.) 0-4 for my teams. No wonder everyone was offering to take me back to the airport. My bad luck is apparently contagious. It was so great to hang out with my warm, funny, gracious, lovely family at the holidays. My nieces and nephews are the best and cray cray adorbs, all of them. (Do you know the commercial? I laugh every time.) As always, we were busy busy busy, but laughing the whole time.
I laughed all the way until my United flight home. The Admiral picked me up at 5 am today for my Baltimore-CHICAGO (always bad news)-Salt Lake flight. The first leg was fine. My layover was an hour and a half and my ticket got me in to the United lounge. All good, until it wasn’t.
We boarded on time, then we sat. When I saw one of the pilots get off the plane, I knew things were about to get twisted. Sure enough, the captain said they couldn’t get the baggage door on the plane to stay closed. He threw out something about deplaning, and I stopped listening. How can these things keep happening and people (myself included) keep getting on these planes? After about 40 minutes, the captain got back on the PA and said the door was fixed and staying closed, but I am now envisioning my bag falling on someone’s cow in Kearney, Nebraska. I’m still on the plane, so I don’t know if we’re leaving a trail of Tumi and Samsonite across America. I suppose we’re not. But I will say this: Should I ever again allow the Admiral to talk me into flying right before Christmas, and should it be on a day or time that Santa isn’t working, I’m taking the sleigh and eight tiny reindeer (plus one). No one’s more dependable than they are. Are you listening, United?
Robyn H.
Laughed so hard, I cried. One of your best “adventures” yet! Love you!