Lost Baggage

So, for anyone who has ever lost their luggage with an airline, you may be able to sympathize with this story.

Upon arriving in the states, you are required to claim your baggage and recheck it with the airline. This is the most inane process that I have witnessed, as the TSA made no special effort to inspect any of our luggage whatsoever. It was by all that I could see, just one of those endless rabbit holes of the bureaucracy of government.

Juliette and I stood around for about 45 minutes waiting to get our luggage from the carousel, we walked through the customs line where one officer was overlooking roughly 3000 people's luggage (at JFK in New York). We stood in that line for about 15 minutes, for the guy just to look at my declaration form and then wave me through. We then had the extreme pleasure of waiting for about 30 more minutes in a line to just put our luggage in its own special line. Then we had to stand in another line for about 15 minutes and be screened to make sure that we weren't sneaking any metal in that they didn't catch in Paris. Could they have just moved the baggage themselves from the plane to our plane? Yes, but in the age of terrorism, they need to justify the people who make you stand in a line and do it for them. Money well spent. If the TSA were actually checking any of the luggage I wouldn't have been so irritated by it, but all they were doing is herding us from one corral to the next.

When we arrived in Palm Beach one piece of luggage was missing, which contained all of our clothing and toiletries. We filed a claim at the office there and got a claim number. Juliette's parents dropped us off at home and I turned my phone on and started recharging it. There was a message from an anonymous agent at Delta. She said that they had found my luggage, but the bag tags were torn off. She left no phone number to return the call, however she did state that I should call the Delta customer care line. The only thing that I can infer from this is that they had gone through my luggage and found something with my name and phone number on it. The problem was that the bag was actually checked in under Juliette's name and so the claim was filed under her name. The Delta system apparently does not bother to look at anything other than your last name, if they were to search through and see that Juliette and my address match, we wouldn't have any problem. I have now called Delta twice, which farms their customer care out overseas. I am not a prejudiced person, but I cannot understand the very nice people who are the representatives of Delta, this is a problem because they are the people who I may be able to explain my situation to.

Thus far, I have had no luck explaining to the two people I have spoken with that in spite of the fact that Juliette and I have different last names, we do live in the same house and are both claimants on this bag. The bag was checked in under her name and did have personal items of mine within it, apparently which had my phone number and name on it.

At this point, the only thing that I can really foresee doing is going back to the airport to speak directly with someone at the Delta desk, because they do not list that phone number anywhere, rather encourage you to call customer care, which happens to not be in the airport that I need, rather half a world away.

And so far, that is the story.