“Keep Your Receipt!”

Please forgive my lack of continuity in advance.  There was not nearly as much downtime in the airport as was expected, and so I am simply clumping these tiny chapters leading up to the end of this 14 hour flight as a series of small vignettes.

Curse you, Angela!  I have always had some serious fortune the few times I’ve hobbled around the hubs of airports.  People have been friendly. Luggage has truly never been lost.  And I have yet to miss a flight.  Oh yeah, and my plane has never gone down in flames, either.  So for all things flight related, that ain’t bad.  However, leave it to Angela at the Delta International terminal to not keep the streak alive!  As soon as my loving and generous mother dropped me off and my eyes were cast to the crowd, somewhere towards the middle-front of the rather long line for bag check-in were two of my future travel mates—Whitney and Carrie.  Carrie was there with her family, and in a truly kind gesture, they were absolutely insistent in those silent shouts across the terminal that they wanted me to cut in line to join them as soon as they were close to the corner.  To add to the amusement, Carrie’s mother Theresa decided to put on a fauz pomp and circumstance by suddenly claiming me to be her son.  Of course, playing my part, I easily embraced seeing her as if it was a meeting long overdue.  So I’m still feeling lucky, right?  I’m welcomed to the rest of the family and it is time to be called out in line… and I get Angela.  She didn’t seem to be all there to begin with, somehow overwhelmed but just shuffling people through, never making eye contact… especially when she ended up giving me Chris Greer’s boarding pass.  Yes, she gave me my own instructor’s boarding pass that was already well beyond the gate.  Of course security would never clear me due to the misnomer, so I sneaked back up to the very front, back to Angela.  Of course I had to wait on her to try and deal with a foreign family with massive amounts of luggage, where she even through out the nonchalant rude line, “You just need to figure it out because I have a long line and I don’t need you here that long.”

Erin Bailey likes coloring cats brown that wear shades and a hula skirt in her coloring book.  True story.

Once the friendly foreign family finally figured things out and abandoned the rude woman to continue their travels, I showed Angela her error and she promptly gave me a new boarding pass.  No big deal, right?

…Well, Angela’s cursed carried me to the LA airport when we were all checking in to get a new boarding pass to Sydney.  I was the second one in our group to go, and when I stepped up to the counter, the nice Asian lady asked for my receipt.  My luggage receipt.  Thanks to the quick super sleuthing skills of Erin Bailey, it was realized that it was stapled to the back of my boarding pass.  And by “my boarding pass,” I mean Chris Greer’s that I was falsely given.  Poor gal had to make many phone calls to discover that it was recorded that I had no luggage to check-in… but Chris Greer now had two.  A major malfunction?  No.  Not so far, anyway, as long as “both” of Chris Greer’s bags are waiting in Australia.  Still, things were not as slick and smooth as they could’ve been, but the curse of Angela shall crush me no more.