“Do you have a job?” the man on the line asked.
“Yeah, I work at Air Canada”
“Oh yeah, what do you do for them?”
“Ahhh, um … lose bags,” I said.
Heating Oil Guy exploded with laughter. He laughed for so long I began to feel uncomfortable, sitting there, phone pressed to my ear, listening to a stranger laugh.
This, unfortunately, is what Air Canada is known for — screwing up. And for our national airline there’s no better time than Christmas to show off what made them famous.
With Christmas travel peaking these past few days I thought now would be the time to give a run down on how things work at a moderately busy Canadian airport during the holidays.
The first notable part of the job is illustrated in the exchange I had on the phone. I used to work as a forest firefighter, it was a job where people I didn’t know thanked me for what I did. Now as a baggage handler, people I don’t know curse me for what I do. It’s usually harmless banter, but there’s always a splash of real annoyance.
Now that you know how devastating this job is on my psyche, here is some insight into how your bag gets lost, or damaged, or briefly lost only to reappear having been damaged.
Let’s start with the mechanics. Many airport check-ins are now automated. People part with their bags alone, placing them on the black tongue of a conveyor belt that swallows them away while a veteran plays “The Last Post”. The days of empty reassurances from a ticket agent are dying. It’s man vs. machine now.
Once out of sight it’s run through an expensive X-Ray machine before it winds up on a carousel, what we call “the belt.” The belt is the centrepiece of what’s known as the “bag room” or the “gag room” as some call it.
Surrounding the belt are carts and small containers used to ferry bags out to planes on the tarmac. Planes at Air Canada fall into two categories: bulk or containerized. Bulk means the bags are loaded into the plane individually and arrive there on carts. Containerized means they are put into sealed containers, “cans,” before they go to the plane. Half an hour before departure time the carts and cans are moved out to the planes.
It’s never been blind rage for me, but bags are my cows. They’re stubborn and heavy and occasionally smelly. (Cologne and curry are popular scents.) If they were sentient beings I would fear for a demo reel depicting the bag room on a busy 12 hour shift. It’s just too hectic to give the kind of care and attention demanded by their owners and by the airline. I’ve spent entire afternoons so fixated on the belt that when it stops so we can catch up, my eyes see the belt moving backwards despite its sitting perfectly still.
On these busy stretches working in the bag room can feel like trying to hold your breath under water. You stay under for as long as possible, scanning with your eyes as many tags as possible, scanning with your scanner the ones closest to departure time. Every so often you have to avert your gaze from the endless monotony to look up at the ceiling and take a breath.
It’s hectic at times, but it’s not like we’re in the bowels of the airport solving math problems on white boards in order to get bags to the right city.
Still, things go wrong.
During my first week on the job I was riding on one of those little tractors with a co-worker when I saw a black bag laying on the tarmac. I pointed this out to the driver and he said, “oh, that’s not supposed to be there.” We picked it up and brought it to the proper gate. I was seeing, for the first time, how a bag goes missing. It fell off an overloaded cart on the way to its flight.
How do we improve this? It’s tough. A certain number of carts are set aside for each flight, but it’s impossible to say exactly how many bags will show up. If there are more bags than expected, carts can get overloaded. Retrieving new carts takes away time and resources that could be dedicated to loading a number of other flights.
There are other places for bags to veer off course. A plane landing at a busy airport with bags connecting to seven or eight other flights can be confusing, especially to a newcomer. Like every other airline, Air Canada’s hiring strategy rests on low starting wages ($11.69 an hour in Halifax) and high turnover. People tend to forgive mistakes on their McDonald’s order, “they’re teenagers,” “they’re low paid.” Well, so are many of us bag people. Contrary to popular belief, not everyone at this unionized airline is making $30 an hour.
Every so often I’ll lift a bag off the belt and the handle will snap, or a wheel will bust off as it glances off the edge of the container door. I figure this happens about once every 300 bags and I figure those are pretty good odds for not breaking a bag. If I lifted each piece of luggage as if it were the Queen’s tea set, nothing would get done. The easiest way to improve your chances of not having a strap yanked off your bag? — don’t make it so fricken heavy! Most of the bags I’ve broken have weighed well over 50 pounds. Of course the reality is many people have to travel with a heavy bag. In that case, have one of those orange 'heavy' tags on your luggage, it’s nice to have the warning.
And speaking of tea sets and tags, those “fragile” stickers on your bag can only go so far. It’s easy for people to get their hands on a fragile sticker and they’re a common sight on the belt. If everyone’s bag is fragile, nobody’s is. Personalized warnings with multiple exclamation marks are more of an attention grabber.
Same goes for those orange priority tags. There’s often a stack available out in the terminal. Baggage handlers have handheld scanners that tell us what category the bag is (standby, regular, or priority). Many passengers try to weasel their standard fare luggage into the first class cart. Sometimes it works, most of the time it doesn’t and it’s a great satisfaction in the bag room to tear a false priority tag off of someone who’s only paid regular fare.
It’s counterintuitive but I sometimes feel I’ve made more of a contribution to society at Air Canada than I ever did forest firefighting. Forest fires are often too large to give you the satisfaction of feeling you’ve done something to stop them. But a long day sending thousands of bags to places around the world is a pretty tangible pay off. I can watch planes accelerate down the runway with a belly full of bags, hopefully in good shape and heading to the right place. But when I leave the airport still wearing my uniform, nobody wants me to kiss their baby, they just want to know why I suck so much