I’m sure everyone has an airline luggage horror story, but my favorite is when I went to pick up a coworker at the airport. We were waiting at the luggage pick up area along with a horde of passengers, watching the bags appear on the belt, coming through the opening one by one. As one bag came through, there was an audible “Ooooooohhhh” from the crowd. “Who’s bag is THAT?”, someone asked. The guy I was picking up mumbled “Oh sh!t, it’s mine.”
Half his bag had been ripped open and the contnets were a shredded, slimy mess. It had evidently gotten stuck on some portion of the automated sysem, which tore open his bag, and ground most of the contents to something resembling a dirty wet mop. It looked like someone had dropped his bag into the wood chipper in the movie Fargo along with a one gallon container of laundry soap. His toiletries had been smashed, and toothpase, shampoo, and shaving cream covered all his belongings and oozed out onto the belt.
He slid the bag off the conveyor on to the floor, and reached in and pulled out what was left of one shoe (the back half was all that was recognizable). When he lifted it up, what appeared to be the top part of a pair of men’s jockey shorts fell from the front of the shoe, and hit the terminal floor with a loud “flop!”. It was clearly audible because all the other passengers gathered around the belt were watching in stunned silence....and keeping one eye out for their bag coming through the opening and thinking, “That couldn’t have happened to my bag too...could it?”
