I never traveled much until I moved to New York. I still can’t say that my travels are diverse; I primarily fly to and from Evansville for a semi-regular trip back to corporate headquarters.

I had a somewhat interesting thing happen to me on my way home last week. I plane side checked my roll-on along with about half of the people on my flight. When we got to Detroit my suitcase failed to materialize, along with four others on the flight, at the side of the plane. This was a first for me (and apparently the others as well). Now I know the saying is, “nothing in life is certain except death and taxes.” Well, I sort of thought plane side checking went in that category, in the sense that it would be impossible for the airline to lose the luggage — apparently not.

Turns out the five us did not get the little green (pink, yellow, or whatever color tag your airlines uses) put on our bags as we were heading out to the plane in Evansville. It didn’t even dawn on me they skipped this step. Apparently, this little tag is how the baggage guys on the other end know the difference between plane side checked and destination checked luggage.

The fun part is that we all had flights to catch, but we were forced to go to baggage claim and try and find our bags. At one point things were looking pretty dire; the bags had seemingly vanished; and we were being told we’d have to file a claim at our destination. We were all a little confused by this since the bags had no routing information and there was no way in hell they were going to make it that far. I felt pretty bad for one guy who had his car keys and wallet in his bag. At least mine was just a few clothes; nothing I couldn’t just walk away from. The deadline to make the last flight to Albany was rapidly approaching — I was debating slipping the one guy a $50 so he wasn’t stranded and cutting bait. As I was reaching for my wallet they finally got it

“So what you’re saying is there were no tags on your luggage”

A point we had been trying to get across for the last hour.

“Well we have a special place bags go when they have no tags, let’s take a look there.”

Now why they didn’t just take us to this special place right off the bat I’ll never know, but low and behold all of our bags were there sitting in a nice circle, getting to know each other.