[gcigale]

I'm sitting in Cleveland now, waiting for a connecting flight to White Plains on my way back from Vegas. The 3 legs of my trip so far have been fine, no delays and no problems, but because of a mistake I made, my experience with Continental customer service has been horrible. I left a customized engraved iPod ($300+ and lots of sentimental value) on the first leg of the trip. I realized I left it on the seat of a very small plane with about 10 passengers on it about 10 minutes after getting off the plane in Cleveland. With only 30 minutes before my connecting flight was leaving on a different concourse (D), I went to the customer service desk and encountered an obnoxious, defensive, and lecturing agent who apparently has no power to get anyone on the plane or the concourse to do anything. I was calm and respectful, but tried to get another representative to investigate, and was yelled at by the customer service person and lectured about checking my bag twice before leaving the plane. 5 hours later, after landing in Vegas, I completed filing the online loss claim, and told not to call or do any followup. Today, two days later, I checked in with lost baggage in Cleveland and nothing has been turned in. Asking if I can take any other action, I was told there is no action to take, "it's like if you dropped money on the street and lost it". No, it's not like droppign money -- it's a very specific expensive identifiable piece of equipment that only 3-5 people could have found in a very specific confined place. And those people are almost certainly Continental employees. I reported it within minutes. Granted it was my mistake, but this is much more like theft than dropping money on the street. And when my 6 year old son found $62 in cash at a Border's book store, we returned it to the store so they could announce to all people in the store -- that's what good people do, but apparently that's not what's expected from Continental employees, and Continental mgmt does not seem to have a *real* process to deal with it. Furthermore, customer service appears to be innefectual and have no regard for such a situation. If they at least tried and were nice about it, I would not have a sour feeling about Continental, and would just have chalked it up as a mistake I made. There's a chance the iPod will turn up, but based on my interactions with Continental people, those chances appear very slim. That's it for my rant. gcigale@tutor.com