The Broken Baggage
I went on a surprise weekend trip to visit my significant other from Indianapolis, Indiana to Rochester, New York. I was leaving Friday morning and returning Monday morning. My first flight from Indiana was canceled, so I was re-booked on to a flight later in the afternoon. Okay, no problem.
But then the afternoon flight was delayed due to mechanical problems and we arrived in Detroit too late for my connecting flight. Well, fine.
I went to the help desk and they again re-booked me for a yet later flight which was scheduled to leave in 3 hours or so. I’d be getting into ROC substantially later than I had originally intended, but that’s okay.
While I was eating dinner in the DTW terminal, the system automatically changed my reservation to a different, earlier flight to ROC, which then left without me since I didn’t know I had been re-booked again.
So then I get to the gate of the flight I thought I was going to be on and I am told that my reservation had been canceled since I was supposed to have left on an earlier flight already. Umm, nobody told me that.
So I went to the help desk again and was given two options: Go on standby for the later flight to ROC (the one I had been re-booked to earlier, then had had my reservation cancelled),
Or go on standby on a flight back to IND, but on the opposite side of the DTW terminal (which is essentially a single mile-long hallway), that left at the same time.
If I didn’t make either flight, there were no other flights leaving DTW for either ROC or IND until Sunday, so I would just be stuck in the airport until the end of the weekend,
And I could only try standby for one or the other flight since they were departing at the same time and, of course, the gates were nowhere near each other.
So I picked the standby flight to ROC, hoping to salvage this weekend with my significant other, and luckily I got a seat. Hooray! I arrived at the airport and then spent about an hour waiting at baggage claim while she waited outside in the car.
Generally, I don’t check bags, but this time I was transporting something I couldn’t carry on (a collapsible snow shovel for her car). Well, my bag never showed up, so we went back to her place and waited it out with only the clothes on my back.
Saturday came and went, and it wasn’t until Sunday afternoon that my checked luggage showed up, just in time for me to leave the next morning. Oh yeah, and the bag’s exterior was now cracked. Story credit: Reddit / (N4zdr3g)