Warning: The following episode contains a good-natured satire of a trigger warning that some audiences may find disturbing. Listener discretion is advised.
Warning: The following episode contains very poor impersonations of French and Italian accents which some actual French and Italian speakers may find disturbing. Listener discretion is advised.
My wife and I once missed our connecting flight from Paris to Florence. We knew it was going to be tight, so, using the “dry run” skills I learned from my father, I spent the last hour of our first leg from LAX to Charles de Gaulle Airport studying a map of our arrival terminal and the best route to our departure gate, which appeared to be somewhere deep in France.
I seem to remember the last flight attendant stationed at the front of the plane, who knew how much ground we had to cover, cryptically whispering “Bon chance” as we blew out the door and down the jetway. After navigating multiple security and immigration checkpoints, up at least one really long staircase, followed by just some good old fashioned American running, we arrived, completely out of breath, at our gate…an empty gate with no people and no plane. Just two very thin, well-tailored sympathetic looking French men compassionately urging us to step up to their counter. We staggered over to their desk and half expected them to offer us some bottled oxygen as the first man started with “Please, please…do not to be ashamed, no one makes this connecting flight” They looked at each other and shook their heads then back at us. The second man then said: “Oh no, no…it is physically impossible for anyone to make this flight. That is what we do. We rebook this flight every single day” The first man then assured us “C’est vrai…to believe you could connect to this flight is like believing in a fairy tale…you might as well attempt to catch your own shadow.” They laughed, and then cocked their heads in unison as if to say: “We understand” which they did not and so we cocked our heads back, because neither did we. Why an airline would continue to book passengers on a connecting flight that you simply could not make we may never know, unless it was a thinly veiled act of French hostility. They booked us on the next flight to Florence because apparently, that was their job, and we went to sit down, just assuming that our luggage had also missed the flight and would be following us on the next one, which it would not.
While we waited, in an effort to process our feelings, I role played one of the gate agents while my wife asked me questions about how we would could have made the flight. “What if we had jet packs?” she asked. “No madame, not even if you and your husband had super powerful jet packs strapped to your backs that propelled you at frightening speed through the terminal, past security and the guards with the machine guns and German Shepherds, even then you would still miss this flight.” She teed up the next one. “What about teleportation?” “Fair question…and yet, no. Not even if you were to scramble your molecules as you departed the jetway of your previous flight and then had them reassemble here at this gate…even then, sadly, you would miss this flight.” My wife then played hardball by asking: “What if we were actually on the flight to Florence already, like if we appeared magically in our seats?” “No…tragically, no. You would be asked to deplane and then wait until you missed the flight. That is how difficult it is, how impossible it is to make this connecting flight.” “Yes, we’re afraid, you two have been doomed since Los Angeles.”
Naturally, our next task would be to contact our dear friends Jennifer and Stuart in Florence who were picking us up, and let them know we had missed the flight, but in an effort to maintain our present state of being totally screwed, my wife admitted she didn’t have Jennifer’s new cellphone number and never did have Stuart’s cellphone number, either old or new. Furthermore, we somehow didn’t even have their home phone number.
Meanwhile, at the airport in Florence, upon arriving and discovering our non-arrival, Jennifer and Stuart approached one of the gate agents in the terminal and received the same information we received. “No…it is my understanding that not even Jesus Christ himself could make that connecting flight…I’m sorry. They have been booked on the next flight.” What they didn’t say is: “…oh, and where their luggage is, only God knows that”
When we finally landed in Italy with just the clothes on our backs and our carry-on bags and discovered our luggage was missing, we didn’t even really care at that point. We were just so glad to have finally arrived and to see our friends that we just filled out the missing luggage forms with Jennifer and Stuart’s address and didn’t even say much to the Italian officials. Again, in the end, it didn’t matter, we were now staying with our dear friends, wearing their clothes and playing with their little children, in what was possibly a haunted former nunnery in a little town overlooking Florence, Italy and yes, we did eventually look up who was the patron saint of lost items, and prayed to Saint Anthony of Padua…as they say: “When in Rome!” or “When Within Roughly Three Hundred Kilometers of Rome!”
Our luggage miraculously manifested two days later.
Missed and Missing