THOUGH THEY HAD DELIBERATELY TAKEN my suitcase off the plane in Trinidad, to give my baggage allowance to someone else, the airline continued taking me for a ride in Barbados.
Tired, harassed, suddenly bag-less, I expected the clerk to bend over backwards to help me; but I was the one the airline wanted to bend over.
“I’m not filling out any forms,” I told the “customer disservice rep”.
She stood arms akimbo. “Then we can’t deliver your bag!” she responded.
“I’ll come for it,” I said.“What’s your name?” she asked.
“BC Pires,” I said, “and I write for the Nation; and this is writing itself.”
She stood silent momentarily but, unable to invent a new obstacle to place in my path, took my numbers and let me go, ruefully: the one that got away.
It would take a half-hour of official contempt next day for me to realise she marked the service high point.
Next morning, trying for my bag, I got the last attempt to give me my comeuppance. Almost 14 minutes after the check-in clerk said an agent would come to escort me, with my wife circling the Grantley Adams Airport’s driveway, like a parro at a food van, the clerk beckoned me to her: the agent now wanted me to come to him.
“Yes,” I said, “We mustn’t put him to any trouble.” She smiled. Sarchasm: the gap between a cutting remark and the ability of its recipient to grasp it.
Five minutes passed at Arrivals before a man ambling by, yawned, pointed a finger at me and raised an eyebrow: “Is you?”
I stared at him. He did his pointing thing again, raised his eyebrow higher. I turned my cold stare down several degrees. A third time he tried to make me speak to him first by finger; my stare would have frozen helium.
Finally, he asked, “You come for a suitcase?”
“Yes,” I said, “and I’m not happy.”
He tilted his head, as if to say, “Well, you not taking it out on me!”
“Where your form?” he asked.
“I don’t have one,” I replied.
“How you expect to get your bag then?”
“I expect you to give it to me,” I said.
“Why you didn’t fill out a form?” he asked.
“All I want from you,” I said, “is my bag. Can you give it to me?”
“You,” he said, defiantly, “will be filling out the form before you collect your bag today.”
“No, I won’t,” I told him, “but you might be filling out a job application form.”
He spun on his heels and walked away. I followed him, uninvited, into the airport.
“I trying to explain to you,” he shouted at me, for the benefit of the security check people; civil service bullies never expect their victims to shout back.
“You not explaining a damn thing,” I said, “and you’re not doing your job!”
“You will be filling out a form just now,” he threatened.
“You’re adding paragraphs,” I said.
I pounced on my bag. He walked away, fuming.
Frowning, the customs officer said he was supposed to escort me to her. “I think,” I said, “he went to get a form for me to fill out.”
BC Pires had a smooth landing but bumpy arrival.
