As I was walking down the steps from the aging Air Canada 767-200 to the shuttle bus that would take us to the main terminal at Dublin, I was mentally composing a blog entry about the flight. It was going to expand on my thoughts that even though nothing really went wrong, it felt like a mediocre experience. Mediocre food. (Dinner was four different ways to deliver fat; breakfast was four different ways to deliver sugar.) Mediocre seats. Mediocre, 1983-style in-flight entertainment. (The feature film was an art-house flop, and one of the supporting pieces was a random episode of the BBC’s Top Gear from 2003. I enjoy Top Gear, but it’s less interesting when they’re featuring obsolete car models.) No duty-free. (Not that I usually buy stuff on the way out, but it was as if they didn’t care.) And mediocre communications: the flight landed 32 minutes late, but the crew didn’t even mention this fact, let alone apologize…
That was before I realized that Air Canada had lost my bag. When I checked in at SeaTac, I checked my bag all the way through to Dublin. Somewhere (Seattle? Toronto?) they lost it. That kind of thing overshadows mere mediocrity.
If all goes as well as possible from this point, they will put it on the next flight and deliver it to my hotel in Dublin tomorrow (Sunday) morning. If it doesn’t go as well as possible… Well, sufficient unto the day and all that. Meanwhile I just walked up to the nearest Marks & Spencer and picked up some things to tide me over.
I was trying to remember the last time this happened. It might have been that terrible trip that I took in the mid-1990’s, when British Airways managed to lose the same bag twice! (The first time when I was flying from Heathrow to Stockholm, the second when I was flying from Lyon to Heathrow a few days later.)
UPDATE 5:49PM: A few minutes ago, I called Servisair, the company that handles baggage at Dublin for Air Canada, but I just got a recorded message. So on a hunch, I plugged my file reference into the Worldtracer tracking page, and it reported:
Bag 1 Status RECEIVED AT AIRPORT / DELIVERY PROCESS INITIATED
Which airport? Oh, well: this seems like good news, so I’ll try to be patient.