When last we left our intrepid international travellers, I'd just been asked by a flight attendant in Toronto if I could identify my wheelchair. Why yes, I could. He nodded and walked back to the front of the plane. Some fifteen minutes passed before he reappeared.
"Has anyone talked to you about your wheelchair?" he asked.
"Not really, no."
He seemed to grimace, but with a kind of mordant humor. He nodded and walked off.
Shortly, the pilot began to speak over the jet's PA system:
"Ladies and gentleman, I'd like to explain the reason behind the ongoing delay of our departure. It seems we have lost the electric wheelchair of one of our passengers and are currently looking for it. As he needs it, we won't leave until we find it."
Yes, you read that right. Somehow they managed to "lose" a 200 lb. electric wheelchair. At this point, I was just laughing. Good grief. As Bugs Bunny said, what a bunch of maroons. Without belaboring the point, they eventually found the chair and we took off for Chicago.
All this lost time almost certainly meant I'd miss my flight back to Chattanooga. The last flight of the day. And, sure enough, I did. The woman, named Karen, at the ticket desk was mortified. The more she heard about the whole fiasco, her face seemed to darken. Karen began making phone calls, tapping furiously away at keyboards (what can they possibly be doing?), and sending Mike, one of the guys who helped transport me off the plane, looking for our luggage. He soon returns to tell us there is no sign of our luggage anywhere. I'm not surprised. I'd half-expected them to bring me someone else's wheelchair.
So Karen leaves her desk, her post. Leaves! She's AWOL now, with us and Mike, a squat, fire-plug of a man, in tow.
Downstairs, the woman in charge of luggage, Lisa, did not offer much hope. She didn't have it. It had likely been stored in the cavernous facility where thousands of pieces of luggage are stored and sorted for later flights. Mike basically resolved to bust in after calling over there and getting the run-around. He retrieved one of our bags but not the other, the most important one. I imagine an Indiana Jones-like scene of Mike swinging in, punching out Nazi goons, clambering to the top of a mountain of luggage piled high.
Karen arranged to put us up at the airport Hilton and gave us vouchers for three meals. We were booked on a 1:20 flight. The rest of the trip passed without incident.
Those three AirCanada employees were heroic. They'll be praised in my otherwise scathing letter to AirCanada's headquarters. That kind of confusion and ineptitude is just unacceptable.
It was a bad end to an otherwise great trip. More to come soon.
About Me
- Paul
- Paul Guest is the author of four volumes of poetry and a memoir. His debut, The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World, was awarded the 2002 New Issues Poetry Prize. His second collection, Notes for My Body Double, was awarded the 2006 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. His third collection, My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge, was published by Ecco Press/HarperCollins in 2008. His fourth collection, Because Everything Is Terrible, was published by Diode Editions. His poems have appeared in Harper's, The Paris Review, Poetry, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. His memoir, One More Theory About Happiness, was published by Ecco in May 2010 and selected for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program. The recipient of a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2007 Whiting Writers' Award, Guest lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.
7 comments:
wow--i didn't think anybody could top my story of our airline nightmare, but you have done it. that *is* inexcusable!
super to meet you, too. :)
Eeeesh . . . Paul What a trip. So sorry to hear it. Glad you finally made it back. Maybe they'll give you a free flight? But would you want it?
I survived at least. At least no bruises this time. All in the name of poetry!
That is the kind of story that makes me wary of getting on airplanes at all. If that's what happens to your luggage, what is happening with the actual plane? Yikes. What a bummer you had such an unpleasant odyssey on your homeward journey, but I'm glad you got back in one piece, and encountered at least some people of good character. At what point did they unearth your wheelchair, anyway?
Do you gate-check your chair? I've never had a problem yet, and I always do. I warn every person I speak with along the way that I'm doing this. The cargo people issue a special ticket to the loading people that allows them to move something with the ticket attached from the human entrance to the cargo entrance.
It's a practiced routine by now -- takes around 10 minutes. I warn the boarding staff, and then supervise as they take apart the chair. Crucial bits travel with me in the cabin -- joystick, Jay back, arm rests, stuffed into a suiter bag to hang in the closet (mobility devices take priority, even over the captain's luggage!) The heavy bits -- power base, batteries and canes travel as cargo. This portion gets muscled down the jetway stairs and placed last in the cargo hold.
This way the chair never travels through the regular cargo path, so there's less opportunity for it to get lost.
When I arrive, I supervise putting Humpty-Dumpty back together again just inside the door. I've made a "how it works" booklet with Polaroids (shows my age!) documenting every step in the dis- and re-assembly.
Do you gate-check your chair? I've never had a problem yet, and I always do. I warn every person I speak with along the way that I'm doing this. The cargo people issue a special ticket to the loading people that allows them to move something with the ticket attached from the human entrance to the cargo entrance.
It's a practiced routine by now -- takes around 10 minutes. I warn the boarding staff, and then supervise as they take apart the chair. Crucial bits travel with me in the cabin -- joystick, Jay back, arm rests, stuffed into a suiter bag to hang in the closet (mobility devices take priority, even over the captain's luggage!) The heavy bits -- power base, batteries and canes travel as cargo. This portion gets muscled down the jetway stairs and placed last in the cargo hold.
This way the chair never travels through the regular cargo path, so there's less opportunity for it to get lost.
When I arrive, I supervise putting Humpty-Dumpty back together again just inside the door. I've made a "how it works" booklet with Polaroids (shows my age!) documenting every step in the dis- and re-assembly.
Do you gate-check your chair? I've never had a problem yet, and I always do. I warn every person I speak with along the way that I'm doing this. The cargo people issue a special ticket to the loading people that allows them to move something with the ticket attached from the human entrance to the cargo entrance.
It's a practiced routine by now -- takes around 10 minutes. I warn the boarding staff, and then supervise as they take apart the chair. Crucial bits travel with me in the cabin -- joystick, Jay back, arm rests, stuffed into a suiter bag to hang in the closet (mobility devices take priority, even over the captain's luggage!) The heavy bits -- power base, batteries and canes travel as cargo. This portion gets muscled down the jetway stairs and placed last in the cargo hold.
This way the chair never travels through the regular cargo path, so there's less opportunity for it to get lost.
When I arrive, I supervise putting Humpty-Dumpty back together again just inside the door. I've made a "how it works" booklet with Polaroids (shows my age!) documenting every step in the dis- and re-assembly.
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