Sort of.

When I had the privilege of paying American an extra fifteen bucks to check my bag today, I had no idea how much extra service they’d be rendering. Apparently, with this new program, they’ve come up with an innovative new luggage-handling process that enables them to expeditiously lose your suitcase on a non-stop. And it only took me an hour and a half after the wheels touched down to discover this new capability.

When I got to the carousel that was supposed to be for my flight, it was full of luggage from not one, not two, not three, but four different Dallas flights, as evidenced by inspection of the tags. Apparently, another innovation that the airline has come up with is to get the luggage to the airport before the passengers arrive, and then helpfully leave it all on the carousel, so that the few bags from your own flight from Fort Lauderdale won’t feel lonely and ostracized, and can fit in better with the crowd. Or perhaps the aircraft simply arrived in LAX sans occupants, the latter having somehow been spirited away en route by Bushco to be shipped off to Gitmo for the ritual waterboarding and holy book defilation, with the airline complicit in both the act and the cover up.

I reported the miscreant item to the baggage service.

“Did you look at the bags we have outside the door here”?

No, that hadn’t occurred to me, because I lacked the imagination to conceive that a bag would be removed from the carousel by the authorities with hundreds still milling around seeking their luggage.

“Let’s go over and look.”

We go back over to the carousel.

“Sometimes it might have a Dallas tag on it, because it might have gotten rerouted.”

This, as there remained hundreds of Dallas arrivals on the swirling machine, whose contents I had now seen several dozen times.

I marveled at an airline that could get a bag rerouted through Dallas and somehow end up there at the same time as I, who took a non-stop from Florida. Does the luggage get to skip the layover?

Bottom line: I am now the proud owner of a receipt that informs me that in the event they locate the missing suitcase, it will be delivered to my room. So I am here for a business meeting in the morning with no clothing except that on my back. Well, OK, and my keister. And, yeah, my feet. But still.

I have to say that I agree with the sentiment.

[Update on early Monday morning]

Well, when I check the web site to track it, it seems to have shown up overnight. It’s supposed to be delivered sometime this morning to my hotel. No word on where it had been sequestered. I was kind of wondering if someone else took it off the carousel. They’re not bothering to verify tags any more at LAX, as they did in the olden days.