Read the first part of this story here.

So there I am, standing in baggage claim in Chicago, crying.

Not my proudest moment.

A Chicago Police officer walked by and asked if I was okay. The whole story came tumbling out through my tears. He’s a credit to his uniform; he let me spill it out without looking at all disinterested.

When I finished, he asked if I’d checked lost and found. Maybe it had wound up there.

I thanked him, and went to lost and found.

Another sympathetic employee informed me that if any bags show up at lost and found, they are taken directly to the baggage services center…where I’d already struck out.

I cried again.

Now, I had made friends with one of the Flight Attendants who worked that flight home. She has a son near my kiddos age, and we bonded over that. I sent her a text asking if she, by any chance, remembered the name of the gate agent who worked that flight. Maybe the gate agent that night would remember something that might give me a clue where my bag had disappeared to!

She didn’t remember, but she looked it up. Then she suggested I head back to the gate we left from; maybe I’d find the agent there, or find someone who knew her.

Back through security and off to the gate. The agent working there was busy boarding a flight; not a good time to ask for help. But the agent at the gate next door was in between flights. I knew he was working on something, but he didn’t have a crowd of people demanding his attention at the moment. Perhaps he could help?

So I asked if he had a minute, and when he said yes, told him my tale.

He was also sympathetic, but said he couldn’t do much to help. He knew that both the gate agent I was looking for and the supervisor who had worked that night were not on duty yet, since they work afternoon shifts.

He did, however, call a supervisor.

After telling the story again, the supervisor started looking stuff up in the computer and making calls. He also shot down my theory about the bags falling off the cart by reporting that the gates in that concourse don’t use carts to transport valet bags. So I was even MORE confused about how our bags went missing.

Over the phone, he got someone to check in the employee lost and found, and two other places I can’t remember.

They managed to find a missing tote bag; unfortunately, it belonged to a Flight Attendant for Frontier airlines. For a moment, my heart leapt! We actually had the same first name! But I clearly have a different last name than this lady, and don’t work for Frontier.

However, that gave the agents an idea. Since my Inflight Manual is in my tote bag, perhaps someone found it, opened it to ID the owner, saw the Manual from MY airline, and sent it over to my operations center.

It sounded like a strong possibility, so I thanked everyone and headed to my terminal to go check.

First, I headed to my airlines baggage center. A quick walk-through, and nope. No bag. Then I called lost and found. They had NO bags in their office at the time.

Then off to my airlines Flight Attendant duty office.

The folks working at the desk that day said that if they had gotten that bag, an email would have been sent out to all office personnel and I would have been notified immediately. They also shared my befuddlement at HOW a valet checked bag could be lost.

Then he made a comment about how if someone found it, they’d be sure to send it to my base.

Uh-oh. I’ve transferred bases twice in the last two years. I can’t remember if I updated the base information in my manual!

So I called both my previous bases, to see if it had shown up there. Nope.

By that time, I had missed my planned-for return flight home. I still had some time to kill before the next flight I could take.

So I headed back to the original, sweetheart of an American agent that helped me. This time, we talked through procedure. I hoped it would help clarify where things might have gone awry. Sure enough, my educated guess on procedure was verified:

• IF a valet checked bag does not make it on the aircraft, for whatever reason, it is supposed to be loaded on the next flight to that destination.
• IF it is NOT loaded on the next flight to that destination, it is supposed to be taken to the baggage service center.

Since obviously neither of those “supposed to’s” occurred, something weird and inexplicable happened. But what?

Time to think outside the box.

What if, instead of putting it on the next flight to my home, the ramp agents just put it on the next flight heading out of that gate?

My sweetheart agent looked up the next flights departing from that gate, which happened to both depart on Saturday morning. The first went to Detroit; the second went to Kalamazoo.

I wrote down the flight numbers, and before I headed off, made sure I got the names of the employees that had been so helpful. This is a rotten situation, but truly, everyone I dealt with (aside from the one baggage service center supervisor) was extremely nice, helpful, and sympathetic. Especially considering my line of work, I try to reward good employees with compliments addressed to the right people.

I left the gate, and then it was decision time. Jed was scheduled to play his first-ever tee-ball game at 6:00 p.m. If I took the next flight home, I would make it with no problems. If I stayed in Chicago to talk to the gate agent and supervisor that worked Friday’s flight, I might not make the game at all, and would certainly miss most of it.

What to do?

This story is so long…part 3 tomorrow!

Friday, April 3rd, I flew on American Eagle from Chicago to Arkansas. I valet checked two of my bags.

Just to clarify, when traveling by air, these are the baggage options:

1. Carry on
2. Check at the ticket counter (for arrival at final destination)
3. Gate check (which means you carry your luggage through security to the gate and check it to your final destination there)
4. Or Valet Check (an option typically reserved for strollers and wheelchairs on large aircraft, but used also on smaller, regional aircraft for roller bags that qualify as a carry on but are simply not going to fit in the overhead bins of a regional jet)

Valet checked bags are left plane side with a tag indicating they are to be returned to the jetway at the end of the flight. The ramp agents pick up the valet bags, carry them through the jetway door, down the steps, and load them straight on to the plane in the cargo hold. It’s a no-brainer, and I’ve never had a problem with doing this.

So, I valet checked my rolling bag and my tote bag, left them in the appropriate spot on the jetway (the 4th and 5th bags to go down, as I was the 4th passenger to board), and got on the plane.

The flight was delayed for a mechanical by 45 minutes, and we sat at the gate for another half an hour (almost) before finally closing the door to leave, but I didn’t care. I was going home!

We landed. After deplaning, a handful of the whopping 22 passengers on board stood in the jetway waiting for our valet bags to arrive. One by one the other passengers gathered their belongings and left.

My rolling suitcase arrived, and it was the last valet bag brought up.

I was missing a bag, and three other passengers were missing theirs. 

We nicely asked the baggage guy to double check the cargo hold. He did; nope. There were no more bags anywhere in the cargo area. He suggested we visit the baggage carousel.

The four of us trouped down to the baggage carousel and waited. And waited.

And nothing came.

So we visited the American check in desk to file claims on our lost bags, all of us flat out amazed that our bags could go missing as valet bags.

I mean, really…how hard is that to screw up?? 

In 36 years of airline experience, I have certainly had lost checked bags before. I have had lost gate checked bags.

But I have never even heard  of a valet bag going missing!

Because of the assumed simplicity of a valet checked bag, my tote bag had lots of important stuff inside. Stuff like ALL our tax documents (I’ve been trying to get our taxes done on my layovers), an external hard drive for my computer with ALL my videos and photos of the boys (the only place I have all of that saved), and my work supplies. 

I need my bag.

The agent there was as baffled and befuddled as we; how on earth could a valet bag get lost? She said that in all liklihood, our bags would be sent on the next flight, which was scheduled for the morning. She nicely gave me the number for the airport directly so I could call and check.

Finding these bags is made more difficult due to the fact that there are no numbers, tags, or other tracking tags on them. With nothing else to do, we all went home.

Saturday I called after the first flight from Chicago. No bags.

I called after the second flight from Chicago. No bags.

I called after the third flight from Chicago. No bags.

I called the 1-800 number for American Airlines baggage issues; no record of my bag anywhere.

As frustrated as I was, I decided to ignore the situation for Sunday, which was Easter. I wanted to spend the day happily with my family. So I did.

But I made plans for Monday.

See, I work for an airline. I understand things go wrong. I’m not mad about this; I’m baffled and confused. Sure, things go wrong with, but this? How?!

The only thing that made any sense was that the bags had been taken down the jetway (the Flight Attendants told me that they had seen the ramp agents take my bags – Flight Attendants recognize Flight Attendant bags from a mile away), loaded them into a cart to take to the cargo hold, and somehow our four bags fell off and no one noticed.

If that’s the case, then surely these untagged bags were taken to the Chicago American Airlines baggage office, right? If my bag is there, surely someone would have noticed, opened it up, found my information, and entered it into the system. Right?

Except…maybe they’re swamped with bags, and mine slipped through the cracks. I know I can spot my bag from a distance; even a well-meaning baggage employee won’t be able to do that…and isn’t as invested in this bag as I am.

It seemed a good idea to fly up to Chicago, look through the bags they’ve got unclaimed in the back, find my bag, and fly home. Easy.

So I left my house at 4:30 am for the Monday morning flight and was in the baggage service center in Chicago at 8:00 am. 

The agent there escorted me to their holding area to look for my bag.

No. Bag.

I was flabbergasted! How could it not be there?

The agent turned me over to the supervisor, who was the one and only person who was less-than-sympathetic that I dealt with the entire day. When I asked him “what happens now?”, he shrugged his shoulders, and with a ‘who cares’ tone of voice said “If it’s not here, it’s not here. They’ll be in touch.”

Not helpful, dude.

I couldn’t help myself; I started crying.

Sure, it’s going to be a pain in the tailfeathers to replace all my tax documents. Sure, I’m going to have headaches for years due to the fact that identity theft is a possibility thanks to so much personal information I had in my bag. Sure, my sons TEFRA application will be delayed now, since I need our finished tax returns from last year in order to apply, which means even longer before our finances improve thanks to the costs of speech therapy.

But that’s all surmountable.

Darrel and I have an external hard drive at home to store all our important stuff on. But the small external hard drive I carry with me at work is the one I use most often. I wouldn’t be surprised if I have NO photos or videos of my kids after Christmas 2013 on the home drive! (I can’t even check, yet, since the only cable we have to connect those devices was in my lost tote bag.)

Somebody, through sheer incompetence, stole part of my memories of my childrens’ racing-by, hard-earned, beautiful childhoods. 

Those photos and videos cannot be replaced. 

This is getting too long, and I haven’t even begun to tell you the hoops I leapt through on Monday. Part 2 tomorrow…