Lo and behold I made contact with the driver. He says he can drop the luggage off between 330 and 4 am. Take it or leave it. 🤷♂️
To back up a bit, before getting the call with the 3-4 am delivery estimate, I spent an hour waiting on hold for the third time with AA and after much back and forth the representative agrees to reach out to the courier, Wheresmysuitcase (for less refined folks Wheretheblankismysuitcase might be a more appropriate name) to update me with the delivery status. She tells me I’ll see it in the notes on the couriers website. Sure enough when I now click on the link in my email the courier now has an added note “Contact PX with delivery time”- but the AA representative entered the wrong number- my phone number is off by one digit. I realized there is an option to edit the note and corrected it.
Soon after comes the phone call. The courier actually emails me a picture of Mohsin, the luggage guy who is going to deliver my suitcase who appears to be a foreigner posing outside of some used run down car lot, along with a delivery estimate that continues to say your luggage is (was?) scheduled to be delivered at 8:30 am 7/24- in the future tense! This is not like when the molad in yerushalayim comes out on shabbos and half the shul says די מולד וועט זיין while the other half says די מולד איז געווען. I mean, there isn’t any third world country where 8:30 am still WILL be. Is there? I now figure there’s a good chance that luggage will never be seen.
Now, however, the link starts showing a tracker; Mohsin is apparently hanging out with my luggage in a warehouse in Valley Stream. After a couple of hours I watch apprehensively as Mohsin starts heading in the wrong direction to Bedford- Stuyvesant. Forget my luggage. Will Mohsin make it out of Bed-Stuy at night? Apparently he does, and begins to hang around East Orange and then Newark for a while. Hey, after Bed-Stuy this guy can survive anything. Edison is next on his itinerary after which he takes a spin out to the Trenton area in the wee hours of the morning. At that point I go to sleep while my wife takes over the watch.
To my surprise he ends up actually showing up with a knock on the door just after 2am and tells my wife it’s good we didn’t waive the signature requirement (the tracking website keeps offering you to waive the required signature) because “so many luggage pieces in your area that are dropped off outside the door without a signature have been disappearing lately”. Maybe think about not doing drop offs outside peoples doors in the dead of night and you won’t have “so many luggage pieces disappearing”. I imagine the folks that waive the signature end up without their luggage and without compensation.
Wheresmysuitcase handles pretty much every major airlines lost luggage. Getting bumped is a minor inconvenience relative to chasing down a lost piece of luggage. It’s a shame the DOT rules don’t reflect this and can continue to allow the lost baggage system to operate like some third world operation from Bangladesh.