Uncle Mitchy's Blog

I travel a lot.  You would know this if you’d read my previous blog posts, but clearly you don’t really love me.  Over the years I have learned a thing or two about traveling, and I have perfected a few techniques to make the experience less miserable.  What follows is the first of many travel tips that I will share with you to make your travel experience better and hopefully reduce my misanthropy just a little.

There are few situations that make me hate the human race more than waiting for my checked luggage at the airport.  Here are a few things to keep in mind if you have checked your luggage…

Relax

The journey from the plane to the luggage carousel is the perfect time to calm yourself and gain your composure.  Take your time.  You could crawl there and you’d still have to wait for your bag, so why not take advantage of the idle time.  Stop at a bathroom to do your business and wash your hands and face.  Call or text your ride to let them know you’ve arrived and will be outside after you get your bag.  Stretch a little.  Release that gas you’ve been storing up since New Mexico.  Make sure that you are in motion when you do this to avoid suspicion.  This technique is known as crop dusting.  It is important to be in a calm state of mind when you get to the luggage carousel or else you may not have the will power to avoid jamming a railroad spike into someone’s eye.

Have A Plan

Your plan starts by choosing the right place to stand. Imagine yourself grabbing your bag and trying to pull it off of the carousel.  I am sure there is a way to identify which direction the carousel will rotate from looking at the scratch patterns on its metal sections, but I haven’t been able to accurately predict it yet, so you’ll have to guess which way the bags are coming.  Find a spot with plenty of room on either side of you. If the people on either side of you are too close, you won’t have the maneuvering room to swing your bag out and onto the floor. If  the entire carousel is blocked by morons, step back and wait for them to battle over their bags. Entertain yourself by watching them knock each other down, since they can’t quite get a good hold of their bag as it moves down the carousel, but refuse to let go – as if by releasing their death grip on the handle, they’ll never see their underwear again.

Inevitably, people will start crowding into the spaces around you, and it will become necessary to take some action once the buzzer sounds and the carousel comes to life. You might want to:

• Fart
• Stare at them in a menacing manner without saying a word
• Lean against them
• Fart again
• Stare at their kids and ask if Megan’s Law applies at airports.

Once you identify your bag, you should be able to grab it, swing it off of the carousel, and make your escape.  If some loser has encroached your space, it is perfectly acceptable to knock him or her over with your bag and say that you didn’t see anyone there.

Put Your Damn Phone Away

Is it really critical that you call someone and tell them that you just landed?  I bet it isn’t.  Give it a rest until you have your bag.  If you have to inform your ride that you have landed, a quick text message will suffice.  If they aren’t technically advanced enough to text, a quick call to say “I’ve landed; I’ll call you when I’m at the curb,” is OK. Once you get into “How was the trip?” you’ve engaged in a conversation that can clearly wait nine minutes until you are sitting next to them in the car.

Keep Your Damn Brood Contained

Look, I chose not to have kids for a reason.  If I wanted to run around an airport yelling, “Upupupupupupupup … put that … Billy! … Don’t touch … Where is your sis… NO … Uppupupuppupup, that isn’t yours … Get off of the carousel … SUZY!!! …”  I would’ve had my own.  You made the decision to breed, so now take the responsibility and keep them in line.  Oh, and by the way, if you say that nobody tells you how hard it is, I am going to find out where you live and rape your puppy.  EVERYONE TELLS YOU HOW HARD IT IS!

Sorry, where was I…  Oh yeah, it really isn’t necessary to have your entire family standing at the carousel unless they are part of your plan.  If you are standing at the carousel carrying an infant, then you’re doing it wrong.  And you’re an idiot.  If you really want to keep them busy as well as have your hands free, put them in one of those plastic trays and let them ride around the carousel in it.  If you’re lucky, they will make it all the way around before child services shows up.

Pitcher and a Catcher

If you have a traveling companion, you can work together as a team.  As the bags come down the way, you can hand one off to your partner and he or she can haul it away. Or, if you both have carry-on luggage, your travel companion can stand aside with all of your carry-on luggage, which frees up your hands to get the rest of your luggage – or to slap the person next to you.

Know Your Bag

Let me guess.  Your bag is a black Samsonite suitcase.  Guess what.  So is everyone else’s bag.  Put something on your bag that makes it definitively yours.  The best example I’ve seen is a suitcase with “Not Your Bag” taped on it with duct tape.  I have tags on mine that say things like “My Clothes Won’t Fit You.”  You can get these or other useful tags from a place called Inventive Travelware.

Hopefully these tips will help you on your next flight.

If you have ever seen the movie “Supernova” with James Spader I feel that I must apologize.  Since I am listed in the credits I feel that I owe you one.  This has nothing to do with my superpower but it is a burden that I have been carrying with me for a long time and I needed to get it off of my chest.  So if you see me and can produce the original ticket stub proving that you actually watched this pile of crap I will refund your $10.

If you have ever seen the movie “Unbreakable” with Bruce Willis you will recall that over the course of the movie the main character learns that he has a superpower.  I had nothing to do with that movie so I won’t be giving you a refund.  Over the past few years I have also discovered that I also have a superpower.  I am invisible.

I know what you are thinking.  You are thinking that you would like a sandwich right now but you are wrong!  I didn’t believe it myself in the beginning.  I started to notice as I walked around anywhere in Los Angeles on a sidewalk (for Angelenos this is the place where you get out of your car when you park it on the street to get your latte) people coming towards me from the other direction would make no attempt to get out of my way.  I know what you are thinking.  You are thinking that Detroit is a horrible place and I agree there had to be an explanation.  Maybe they were looking at their cell phones to see what Miley Cirus was tweeting about.  Maybe they were distracted by the fact that they actually had shoes on.  Maybe they were trying not to break their mothers back.

I started to pay more attention and this wasn’t the case.  People would actually look me right in the face and make zero effort to get out of my way as if it was my responsibility to move.  I tried putting on my best menacing face but I couldn’t look tough if I tried.  I tried stopping dead in my tracks to make it clear that I was not moving and they would actually bump right into me and act surprised that I was there.  Clearly I thought that people just suck and have lost all consideration and common sense.

I know what you are thinking.  You are thinking that anyone wearing an Ed Hardy tee shirt is a douchebag but it wasn’t only on the sidewalk.  I also started noticing this at the airport.   In the line to check bags people would cut in front of me like I wasn’t there.  On the escalator people in front of me would stop dead in their tracks at the top to look at their ticket and make sure they weren’t going to miss their flight to Toledo causing me to plow through them when I reached the top.  On the plane the other passengers were constantly whacking me with their “carry-ons” which were roughly the size of refrigerator.

After the flight while waiting at the luggage chucker 9000 people would shove their way in next to me to wait for their over-sized bag to come around.  Of course they didn’t have the physical strength to successfully pull this crate off of the carousel which inevitably led to the bag dragging them helplessly right into me.  Clearly they didn’t understand the concept of a circle and if they simply let go and moved down the line they could have a little more room to hoist their bag into someone else.  They must believe that all luggage will only go around the carousel once and if it isn’t retrieved at that time it will get shipped to Afghanistan to fund terrorism.

So I have come to the conclusion that I must be invisible.  I have yet to decide if I should use my superpower for good or for evil but if you find yourself on an airport escalator and you start fumbling around for your boarding pass, don’t be surprised if you find my invisible foot shoved in your ass.

Yesterday I get a call from a confused sounding woman who identifies herself as Delta Baggage Services at JFK. She was wondering if the bag that she was staring at belonged to me. She was confused that the name on the ID tag was Goldstrom and the name on the airline tag was Tullo. Even more confusing to her was that this was a Northwest bag and had no business being in the Delta Baggage Department.

I gave her the 10 digit file reference number which encoded the fact that it was a Northwest bag and informed her that if she had read a newspaper or watched something other than American Idol she would know that Northworst had been bought by Delta Airlines and now they both suck.

She verified the information on the claim (which was wrong) and said that my bag would arrive at my hotel about 5 hours later. Sure enough when I got back to my room I was reunited with my underwear after 36 hours apart.

As I write this it is a few minutes after 12am on Wednesday August 12th.  I am currently in New York.  I arrived here on Monday August 10th at about 4:30PM.  You would think since it is 2009 and airlines have been handling bags (or mishandling them in my case) for 60 years or so that they would have this down to a science.  As I stare at the only pair of shorts I have in my possession that I wish for too much.

My New Friend

I arrived at JFK on Northwest (I hate Northwest) Flight 1232 from Detroit (I hate Detroit).  My wife and I waited patiently as the local New Yawkas pushed us aside to get thier bags which were clearly more important than ours.  Finally my wife’s bag came down the carousel but mine was not to be found.  We waited and waited until the carousel made that haunting sound as it lurched to a stop signaling that my underwear was on a separate journey from mine and our paths were not to cross again.

By this time the important New Yawkas had collected their critical baggage and had cleared the baggage claim area for important destinations which I am sure they would describe as “ovvaaah heeeya”.  There were a few of us poor souls left who had been separated from our underwear and as a group we made our way to the Delta .. no wait… Northwest … no wait Delta .. luggage “services” kiosk.

The “fuggin guy” behind the counter took my information and informed me that my underwear should be on the 6PM flight and should be delivered to my hotel that night since they delivered 24 hours a day.  He said that he would call me in a little while to give my my ten digit tracking number.  True to his word, he called as we were waiting to catch the “A” train to Tribeca with my tracking number and gave my a 1-800 number to call for my information.  His call came from “Blocked” which should have been a sign that I was to have no further contact with a human being regarding this matter.  I wrote down the information and we took the subway to our hotel.

When we got to the hotel I called 1-800-745-9798 hoping to talk to Joey or Vinny or Lou or whatever the fuggin guy’s name was but instead I was connected to an automated service asking for my ten digit number.  The nice robot told me that I could also find this information from http://delta.com/baggage.  Since I am an internet nerd I decided to try that route.  Of course none of this worked and no matter how many times I hit the zero key I couldn’t get a human being.  Finally I figured out that since the merger between Delta and Northwest wasn’t complete yet I needed to go to http://www.nwa.com and I finally got a response that led me to believe that they actually knew who I was and where my underwear might be.  It is still Monday night August 10th.  By midnight I gave up hope that I would see my precious underwear that day and felt confident that I would be awoken early by the hotel staff bringing my underwear to my room.

Tuesday morning came and my underwear was still lost.  I checked http://nwa.com and the status was “TRACING CONTINUES. PLEASE CHECK BACK LATER”.  I called 1-800-745-9798 and they robot assured me that they had no information about my underwear and the best way to track it was to go to the web site.

I had to wear my smelly old clothes to go to the Banana Republic near my office to buy a new outfit for the day.  It’s a snazzy number befitting a guy named Chaz or Thad or some other east coast douchebag that gloats over his winning the last regatta at the club.  All day I checked the status of my underwear on the internets and was assured that tracing was continuing; “TRACING CONTINUES. PLEASE CHECK BACK LATER”.  My coworkers made fun of my blind faith that by the mere act of hitting the refresh button on firefox my underwear would find its way to me but it wasn’t to be.

At the end of the day I was reminded of all of those cop dramas where they tell the parents of the kidnap victim that if their son wasn’t recovered in the first 36 hours they were most likely dead.  My poor poor underwear was all alone somewhere bound and gagged awaiting a ransom that would never come.  I went back to Banana Republic to shop for the tomorrows regatta.

As each hour passes I have less and less confidence that my underwear will make it out alive and not end up on www.unclaimedbaggage.com.  The thought of replacing all of my jeans, underwear, socks, medicines, tee shirts, etc just pisses me of and feeds my hatred of Northwest Airlines and all things related to Detroit.  Hell I just bought this piece of luggage last week.

As I drift off to sleep I can only hope that I will be awoken by the hotel staff to tell me that my bag has arrived but I’m not holding my breath.