I profess to have very little faith in the airline industry these days. I haven't had a single flight that was on time this year. It starts with a boarding delay or sudden gate change, but just as you begin to look anxiously at the various surrounding screens in the airport or you sit in your specially timed taxi or drag all your luggage to the  front door at home, the delay notifications begin to roll in at thirty minute intervals. And they keep coming in and keep coming in until you're marooned and carefully crafted plans are now ruined. This summer has been littered with cancelled flight horror stories. The kind where, "Do you know who I am?!" and "You won't treat me like a dog!" are uttered. One of my DC friends told me a story where their DC return flight had gotten to the point where the airline staff threatened to call the fed and someone screamed, "I AM THE FED!"

So it was to my utter surprise that my first experience with an airport's lost and found services was positive. As a retro camera enthusiast, I'm used to requesting that my cameras get hand inspected. The two best reactions to this has been that at the PVD airport, as soon as I shyly took out a camera, they anticipated my ask with an air of professional pride and the other had been in Canada where I handed them my camera with my request, they patiently listened to my explanation of why it could not be opened and simply abandoned the search and handed me my unexamined camera back to me when I myself was finished with the x-ray machine. Imagine that. Taking the time to listen to me and accepting my reasonable explanation rather than assuming that I was trying to smuggle a bomb. Only in Canada. My worst experience has been at the Baltimore airport where I duly handed over my camera and never received it back. This was admittedly closer to being entirely my fault. The humidity, long day, and Zadie's had certainly curbed my cognitive functioning, but in my defense, in all my time passing my cameras to TSA, usually they were good about finding me in line and handing it directly back to me. 

I realized my mistake unpacking the next day in a slow, horrified remembrance that isn't so much remembering forgetting to take the item so much as an absence in memory where the receiving of the item should have been. There was a moment where I at first resigned myself  to simply having lost a $70 camera I had obsessively researched and bought just a couple weeks before, having dreamed of a summer with getting into film photography. But I Googled and found the dedicated webpage for BWI's lost and found department. I submitted the very straight forward lost item request form (thankfully a testing spree of my office's new label maker meant I had a distinctive script on the back of the camera reading, "Hold Still!") and maybe two days later the BWI lost and found department reported that my camera had been located and had a ready to go FAQ page of next steps including giving them a signed form to release my item to the UPS and the the contact info for their UPS contact. 

SURPRISINGLY HIGHLY EFFICIENT. Good job, BWI. Their contact with the UPS...less so. I'm sure they are a great UPS worker, but perhaps not a particularly enthusiastic responder to emails. After such a great experience with BWI's lost and found, I thought it worked like a well oiled machine and expected the UPS contact also to have a FAQ page for the UPS process. Instead I entered a rather protracted conversation negotiating the estimated payment for getting my item sent to me and then receiving that paperwork and having it processed. At one point the email replies were so unclear that I got desperate enough to cc-BWI lost and found to prod the UPS contact into continuing our emails, especially since I only had a month of my item getting held and the UPS contact took a week to respond to each email.

But finally, my camera arrived, safe and sound in conscientious and meticulous wrapping. It wasn't Amazon fast, but hey, learning there is any form of helpful customer service at an airport seemed faintly revolutionary.