It’s been a busy month for travel. I was on the east coast at my employer’s headquarters for a week, then in North Dakota for a friend’s graduation from medical school for a long weekend, then home for five whole days, then back east for another week at headquarters last week. I’m home again for two weeks before going back for another week, and this sort of schedule is how I’ve come to have platinum-butt status with my favorite airline.

I was bummed out not to get home for the long weekend before midnight Friday, but my bag has had an even more exhausting journey. For some reason it went from Raleigh to Dulles to Taipei to Tokyo to Chicago. My guess is that the unusually harried gate agents at RDU got my bag tag and somebody else’s mixed up. It was supposed to come to Oakland Sunday night by way of Kansas City and Denver to be delivered 9:30am Monday, and then it was supposed to do that yesterday to be delivered 9:30am today, and now it’s supposedly landed from Chicago in Oakland and is going to be delivered late afternoon today. All I can figure is that my bag has been doing its best to enjoy its stays in Taipei, Narita, and Chicago. I know that two of those can be fun places, and I’d sure like to find out about the third.

I really don’t think it’s fair that my bag gets to go more places than I do. For crying out loud, it’s just a stupid Costco wheelie-dealie whose greatest accomplishment to date has been not falling apart. I’m a well-educated and some would even say personable high-tech professional who can offer greetings, thanks, inquiries after the price of an iron chair, and toasts in least a dozen languages! I asked the airlines platinum-butt service rep guy who was updating me on its itinerary whether they would consider compensating me by letting me go on the same itinerary my bag got to go on, since I’m platinum butt and all. He chuckled and said it was not a request he’d ever heard before. Unfortunately, he wouldn’t go for it, but he did call back a little while later to say that he’d gotten me a couple 500-mile upgrade certificates. I wonder if he would’ve gone for Victoria’s idea, which is that I should at least earn butt miles for the segments my suitcase has flown without me.

I wonder if they’ve at least had the decency to supply it with meal vouchers while it was languishing in all those airports.

The really irksome thing about all this is that the only reason I didn’t bring it home carry-on was that I’d bought a bottle of mouthwash that was bigger than the one mouthful’s worth that I would have been allowed to carry on. Because of course anybody who’s ever watched a thriller on TV knows that you can take down a jet with a bottle of mouthwash, a knitting needle, two AA batteries, and a few feet of violin string. Add a laptop and a pair of canvas sneakers, and you can take out a skyscraper, right?

I’m so tired of the “look busy!” mission of the Travel Illusion-of-Safety Administration. Let’s get Hillary into the Oval and then ask her to disband the whole charade. If she put together an advisory council of smart six year olds, they could probably design something more effective and sensible than what we have now.