Carrie’s Ramblings

Time to spare, go by air
Carrie posted in What's happening on January 11th, 2009

I wrote this post when I was sitting on the terminal floor in Vancouver for hours on end. After the craziness of playing catch-up for this whole week I’m finally getting around to posting it. More updates on how I’m surviving the cold to come!

As I sit here on the floor of the Vancouver airports Arrivals and stare longingly overtop of the mounds of misplaced luggage at the carousel. It slowly moves around and around with the same 7 suitcases. I begin to reflect on how exactly I ended up here. It’s 3 am. I’m tired, and hungry, and sore, and upset that there’s no one to blame, but I’m going to stare at that carousel until my luggage comes, or it stops.

I start at the beginning:
It’s 12:30 pm on Sunday afternoon and the whole fam damily pours into the trusty minivan for a group trip to the airport. Usually these annual post-Christmas trips are just a simple slow down at the curb and hop out blowing a kiss and running into the terminal, but since my return date from Whitehorse is unknown at this time, this seems more of an occasion to actually park the car, stumble out, and stand in line at the check-in counter. And yes I still go to the check-in counter. There’s something about web check-in that just doesn’t make sense to me. How can you check-in, if you’re not AT the airport? I understand checking in as to represent, “I am here, ready to go.” But if you check-in on the web up to 24 hours before your flight, what happens if something comes up between web check-in and arrival at the terminal? Say, hypothetically, if someone should sleep through their alarm and miss their flight? But that person has already checked-in, so the airport ants are running around trying to find this person, even though they aren’t there! So I just don’t use web check-in just in case something like that should happen. In case.

The carousel has slowed down; this can’t be good.

So there I am with family in tow faithfully hauling my 50 lb suitcase and 13 kg skis around T1, and I am waiting forever in a line for those “Express check-in” machines, because you’re not actually allowed to talk to a PERSON when you check-in. Mom hovers over me as Dad and Hayley go stand in the baggage drop off line to give us a head start when we get there. I scan my passport and it wants to confirm who I am so I have to put in my credit card as well. Then it asks me if I am who I am, and something about my Airmiles? I read it quickly and push the screen and then it wants me to input my Aeroplan number and assign where I want the airmiles to go, but I don’t have that information readily available so it beeps at me and I panic and try to go back but the screen doesn’t register my push then it freezes then it goes back a gazillion pages because I pushed it so many times and ahhhh I’m back at the beginning.

Aha I win, the carousel is moving again.

Mom says, “You’re doing it wrong.”
I respond, “No kidding, it’s this stupid computer. Why can’t I just talk to a real person?” I re-scan my passport and go through the song and dance again. I get to the screen that says you’re allowed 2 checked bags, would I like to add more and say no I don’t want to add more and then it prints my boarding pass with no baggage tags.
“It didn’t print your baggage tags,” Mom points out.
“Yeah I got that! I messed up I’ll have to do it again.” So I scan my passport yet again and it’s mad at me now and says that I’m already checked-in and that I don’t have anymore tickets but I can makes changes so I do and add the 2 bags of checked luggage and then hit print and it prints out my boarding pass with no baggage tags.

(Ohhh hopeful craning of neck for possible luggage sighting…no such luck.)

Then a super unhelpful Air Canada girl comes up and says, “Oh did it not print your baggage tags? That’s because you don’t have a seat assigned. See there where it says ‘Stand By’?”
“Whoa, whoa!” I cry out. “I paid a lot of money for this ticket I’m not flying Stand B–“ She cuts me off and says impatiently, “I know. It’s just because we oversell seats based on the number of people who statistically don’t show up. You’ll get a seat when you get to gate.”
“Fine.”

“Ladies and gentlemen, there ARE still more bags coming.” Oh good.

So we cut into line where Dad and Hayley have been faithfully holding place with the heavy bags. It’s now 1:23 (plenty of time for a 2:10 flight) and an Air Canada woman pulls me out of line to go right up to the next available agent. Again I reflect upon the absurdity of this check-in process. What is the point of having to go through the whole computer debacle if I STILL have to talk to an agent. Why not just skip that step, and a whole lot of stress on my part, and go right to the agent? But he of course weighs my bag and it’s 4 lbs overweight so that’ll be an extra $75 and instead I rip open the bag and take out a book, my empty purse, and my jacket to get it under the requisite weight and avoid charges. He gives me back my boarding pass and sends me over to another line to deposit my skis. They look at my boarding pass as well and send my skis through. I say a quick goodbye to my patient family and then head over to stand in the security line.

So many bags, so few that are mine. I hear shouts of joy as some people get theirs and book it out of here. Whoa! One dude just grabbed the extendable handle thing on his bag and tried to pull it off the carousel only to have to shatter into pieces and send him flying backward into the crowd.

After my strip search at security I get to the gate where they call my name as promised and give me an official seat. Now this is a key moment here. In all the confusion I fail to notice that my boarding pass does not send me all the way through to Whitehorse, just to Ottawa. In fact, it’s not until I’m sitting on the plane to Ottawa that I look carefully at the pass and see that it says nothing about my connecting flights. I’m not going to panic though, because clearly I’m in system so it’ll be fine. There’s plenty of layover time in Ottawa to get a new pass etc. But wait! It’s 2:30 pm (20 minutes past departure time) and we’re still sitting at the gate. The captain comes on and explains that they’ve put 6000 kg too much fuel in the plane and they have to wait for the truck to come back and empty some out or else we’ll crash and burn when we land. That’ll be a 25-30 minute wait. Two hours later we’re still sitting on the runway and I’ve finished a film on the TV and we’re still in Toronto. We get defueled but by this time it’s started to rain so we have to go to the de-icers and that takes even more time. But it’s okay because they’ve informed the Vancouver flight that we’re coming and they’ll hold the plane for us. Oh good.

Upon landing in Ottawa the flight attendants ask everyone to remain seated to allow those of us trying to get to Vancouver to boot it off the plane and over there. We do, but I have to go to desk again and say, “I don’t actually have a boarding pass.”
The guy types away, “You’re not checked-in.”
“Well how I can I not be checked-in if I just got off that plane?”
“Fine.” Type type type, out comes the 2 passes for Vancouver and then to Whitehorse, and I quickly ask, “There’s no chance that my luggage is going to make it over is there?”
“I don’t know and I don’t have time figure it out now. Next!”
Well fine then. You coulda said ‘No’ considering that’s what I was expecting anyway. So I hop on the plane with reasonable certainty that my bags are going to get off the plane in Ottawa and be those annoying ones on the carousel that go around and around and around and no one claims and everyone thinks “Where is this person?!”

And so the carousel stops, and I’m not surprised in the least that I am sans-luggage.

The Vancouver flight is fine until we get over BC and the captain comes on and tells us that there’s this crazy snowstorm in Vancouver, and since it’s Vancouver they’re all freaking out and don’t know what to do with it, so we’re going to turn around and go to Calgary where they’ve got more sense. Then we’re in Calgary still sitting on the runway not really sure what’s going on. They don’t know if we’re going to refill and then try Van again, or get off or what. Then they decide to just cancel our flight and put everyone on this huge 777 going to Van. Great! What’s that going to do? If it’s snowing, it’s snowing, it doesn’t matter how big the plane is! But we dutifully get off the plane and book it to the new gate and sit there and wait. And wait. Four hours later they finally go through everyone alphabetically and get us on the big huge plane and take off. We land in Vancouver and everyone has missed all their connecting flights and we are all told to head down and collect our baggage and book new flights.

It’s 2 am Pacific time (5 am Eastern) and I come down the stairs into refugee-ville. The place is clogged with luggage. You can barely get at the carousel there are mountains and mountains of bags in the way. Everyone stares it over with this glossy-eyed look and then take up position staring at the empty, unmoving carousel. With the power of our minds we will get it to work. Being relatively confident that my bags are still in Ottawa sitting there all by their lonesome I glance at the carousel and decide to head upstairs and see if I can arrange a ticket while I’m waiting to confirm that my bags are in fact not here. I come up the stairs and see…MORE bags! Everywhere! How can this be? Some bags are covered with what looks like emergency blankets. Wait, that bag is moving! Holy crap it’s a person! People are sleeping all over the terminal floor next to the bags waiting for the ticket agents to come back and save them. It’s like the football stadium post-Katrina. No one can leave because they don’t know when their next flight is, because there are no ticket agents around, but there’s no place to stay. It’s like purgatory, neither here nor there. People are sleeping on their luggage, using jackets as pillows, sleeping in luggage buckets, against support pillars, in the actual ticket line. I even saw some people sleeping in those little golf carts that they drive around the airport. Every outlet is used by people charging computers or cell phones and everyone speaks in a quiet hush as though this is a really solemn funeral or something. For some it’s a funeral for their bags, for their messed up vacation, for a missed day at work, wedding, or first day of classes. And so we sit here with nothing to do but wait.

Eventually I did make it home. I waited at the carousels for 3 hours while they promised more bags were coming, then I waited in the new ticket line for 3 hours 29 minutes to get myself on the 11 am flight to Whitehorse. The flight was delayed first by 20 minutes for some mechanical thing, then by another hour and half for some fuel thing, and 2 hours late we take off. But because the middle fuel tank wasn’t working properly we weren’t going to make it all the way to Whitehorse without stopping to refuel. So we have a little pit stop Fort St. John and then take off again. Three hours late we arrive in Whitehorse and about 50% of the people don’t have their bags. I stand in line, again, and fill out a luggage file and then get a lift home in the -38 C weather. I’ve missed a day of work, I have rehearsal in an hour and a half, and my car is frozen solid. Surprisingly, both bags came the next day so that was impressive.