Emotional Baggage

I thought I was over USAirways losing our luggage and making me wallow in my own filth for a day. Really, I thought I was. But yesterday, we had a graduate student friend who's on the job market and has several interviews around here, so we offered to pick him up from the airport. He was flying in from (surprise, surprise!) USAirways.

Since the USAirways web site denied any knowledge of the flight number I was given, I called the phone number listed on their website at 1-800-438-4322. I have to say that their automated system is the very friendliest I have ever heard. When you dial the number, there is disco music in the background, and a woman invites you sexily, "Call 1-800-918-TALK. That's 1-800-918-T-A-L-K. Just 99 cents per minute," before hanging up on you each time. While this was certainly the friendlier phone line, apparently 1-800-428-4322, the number listed in the phone book, provides more practical information.

Well, when my wife and I drove my parents' car to pick up my friend, we couldn't help but reminisce about our own trip just a few days ago. Once our friend got in and we were waiting for his bags, we exchanged pleasantries. By "pleasantries," I mean offering inquiries into his trip which would enable me to show my own travel scars. "Where did you fly in from? Oh, from Chicago, that's where we flew in from, where there was a lot of bad weather. Did you have trouble making your connecting flight? What a coincidence, so did we. We were supposed to have a four hour layover, but the flight was delayed so long that when we landed, my wife had to run to the bathroom, and I had literally to run to a fast food place so we could grab a dinner to eat on the plane. Do you see your baggage yet? You know, when we were waiting at a baggage retrieval system at this airport, we didn't see our baggage yet either, because they never put it on our connecting flight to begin with, and we had to wait for them to send it in the 'morning,' by which they meant, our bags would not arrive at my parents' house until after dinnertime the next day."

Now, a funny thing happened while we were standing there, waiting for his bags to come in. By, "a funny thing happened," I really mean, "a thing failed to happen," namely, his bags showing up. This whole experience of seeing someone else lose their luggage from USAirways is like same-life deja vu. It's sort of like if you read the book of Genesis, and Abraham is pretending that Sarah is really his sister, and you say, "Didn't that just happen a few chapters ago, and didn't God curse everybody else that time, too?"

Well, on the plus side, I knew exactly where to take our friend to apply for his lost luggage. On the minus side, the experience reopened wounds that had just been healing--in fact, made them worse than they had ever been, because I have seen how much better they have treated my friend than they treated us. We arrived around 10 pm and had to wait for our luggage until the next evening--whereas our friend, who arrived at 5 pm, would receive his bags that night! Further--the unkindest cut of all--they had given him a complimentary packet with soap and shampoo inside. I even fear that the complimentary packet included additional materials, materials he did not dare to show us because he knew we would be hurt, materials such as coupons. They gave him an entire complimentary packet, whereas a husband and wife, with nothing to live on but love, were not even given one bar of soap to share between them. Why would they do something so emotionally crippling and so harmfully stinkifying to us? I hadn't even cursed or sworn at them for losing our luggage, so why did they give him such obvious preferential treatment? Was it class-related, because he was only one bourgeoise grad student, whereas we were two of them and thus twice as much "the man" ... even if one of us wasn't a man at all? There is no answer ... only silence. And formerly lost luggage. The luggage may no longer be gone, but the emotional baggage is something I will never lose.