What’s with all of this carrying on? NSCA BLC bound!
On the way to my first NSCA BLC and I wasn’t sure what to pack. I’ve packed for tradeshows before, but this was a conference and although I was there to absorb and help, I was really going to be more of an attendee. How do you pack for that? I hadn’t had experience, business casual – eeek! So I did what I typically do. Overpacked.
Now, I have NEVER been very good at fitting all of my things into carry-on luggage, so when the sky cap agent said, “Can I take your bag to check,” I gave him an enthusiastic yes. This was my first mistake.
What the sky cap neglected to inform our group was that our American Airlines flight had been cancelled the day before. Yet, still, this man took our luggage for a flight that was not going to take to the skies. Instead, after a miraculously uneventful – walk thru/ fly by in security, our group found themselves face to face with an AA agent that told us there was plenty of room on her flight, but that we would not able to go without our bags. Bags which had unfortunately gone into cyber-airport-luggage space at LaGuardia.
Evidently, AA policy is that travelers must travel on the same plan as their luggage. Makes sense for a lot of reasons. We were not happy about it, but we had to respect it for security reasons.
So we watched as they closed the gate to the 6:45AM flight to Dallas and we watched as they maxed out the 9AM flight we were on standby for, and then we boarded at 10:25AM flight and headed off. When we got to the DFW airport and chugged down to baggage claim, we watched as the carousel went round and round but alas, our bags were not there. We asked at luggage retrieval – the home for wayward bags and was told with certainty that our bags had not only flown without us, but they had landed with an earlier flight and were spinning around on a carousel in a different terminal. So much for corporate policy.
In front of a group of my new colleagues, I learned an important lesson. Check your phone messages, check the airlines, it is solely up to you to make sure that you have the information you need to get where you are going. The other thing I learned is that I need a class on packing so I can fit my stuff in something smaller than a steamer trunk. Maybe next year at the BLC they’ll come up with such a class. For now, I’ll be packing and repacking my bags for InfoComm until I get it right. On second thought, maybe I’ll just ship the shoes.