Quote:
Originally Posted by apoplectic
It was clear that she was very mentally confused, as she repeatedly --three times-- told me to call 'Gerry' to come and get her, at 8:00 in Castlegar. The problem is that I am Gerry, and she should have said my brother's name. Further, she didn't even know the name of the man who was giving her the ride.
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Obviously she had some sort of mental episode. And yes it may have been just being tired. But when her flight was delayed, where did she go to? Did she even go to the gate counter to ask for help? You've never answered this. She may have never even gone to the counter.
This reminds me of a situation I had in baggage service once. An elderly lady flew in and came to report her bag missing. Her daughter pushed her in the wheelchair. The passenger was very adamant that she had checked her bag in when she left Detroit. Told us how she saw the guy at the counter put a tag on it, and saw him put in on the belt. But she had no claim check, and in the computer it showed her having checked in nothing. But her daughter got upset with us, saying that her mother was not senile or crazy.
Well, the other part I noticed in the computer was that she had flown from Flint, not Detroit. Not a huge detail, but the mother insisted that she had flown from Detroit, and again her daughter laid into us that her mother knew what she was talking about, until I showed her the boarding pass her mother had which showed Flint.
I then called Flint to try to find out anything I could on the bag. I talked to the agent that had checked her in, and he remembered her, but said that she had in fact carried her bag on. He also told me that the station manger was the one who had pushed her in the wheelchair. So I called the station manager, and she told me that the lady had in fact taken her bag with her to the gate, that she remembered putting it on the foot pedals between the passenger's feet (standard practice) and remembered having to help her with it for the passenger to go the restroom. She told me she would check with the gate agents, and call me back.
Well, it turns out that the passenger had left her bag in the gate. The airport police had said they found it over in a corner. When the manager asked the gate agents, they told her that none of the passengers had been in a wheelchair at boarding, but there was one elderly passenger who walked on very slowly, but refused help. They had found the bag in the gate area at some point, but they had no idea who it belonged to. So at some point, this passenger had ditched her wheelchair, set her bag down in the corner and ended up walking away from it. But when she got us, she just knew she had left it with the agent at the ticket counter.