What I Imagine Will Happen if I Check My Bag at the Airport

The moment the airline representative puts the tag on my bag, my credit card is charged a $50 hidden checked baggage fee. My bag is placed on the conveyor belt and disappears behind a set of flappy plastic curtains. Directly behind the curtains is a 100 foot drop. My bag plummets, crashing into a disorganized pile of luggage. On impact, my facewash squirts out of the bottle, ruining my clothes. My iPad immediately shatters in two. My electric razor turns on and starts buzzing loudly, which is kind of embarrassing because people might think it’s, like, a vibrator or something.

 

Even though my flight is set to take off in ten minutes, my bag is still hidden under a pile of other, unsorted bags. A well-meaning baggage handler tries to grab my bag, but just ends up ripping off the luggage tag.

 

Meanwhile, I find that my gate is less than a one minute walk from the security checkpoint. I realize I’ve perfectly timed my airport arrival, meaning I only have to wait for five minutes at the gate before my zone starts boarding. There is plenty of seating near the gate. “Wow, I guess taking that bag as a carry-on wouldn’t have even been that cumbersome,” I think to myself.

 

On the plane, the overhead bins are luxuriously spacious. They would be more than big enough to accommodate my bag, which is technically a few inches over carry-on regulation size, but who’s checking? Miraculously, no one else in my row puts any bags in the overhead bins, meaning I don’t have to awkwardly navigate up and down the aisle looking for a place to put my bag while other people are trying to board.

 

By the time my flight takes off, my bag has already been rerouted to Chengdu, China. This is concerning because I am flying from Boston to New York.

 

As my bag is waiting in a holding area, a roving band of criminals enters the facility. They immediately guess the lock combination on my bag (1234) and dump all of its contents onto the grimy floor. They find my passport, credit cards, and social security card, and immediately sell the information on the dark web. One of the criminals is a budding graffiti artist, and he spray paints my suitcase with crude doodles of penises.

 

After the criminals leave, an electrical fire starts in the facility, badly burning my bag.

 

As my flight takes off, I realize I left my anxiety medication in my checked bag. I’m a nervous flyer, meaning I feel like I’m about to die literally every minute of the flight. A flight attendant seems to feel bad for me and offers me a cookie, which I immediately have an allergic reaction to. Fuck. I left my allergy meds in my checked bag, too.

 

I arrive at Laguardia breaking out in hives and deboard the plane. The walk from the gate to baggage claim is short, so I arrive way before any of the bags are coming out. “Hmm, I could have saved so much time if I was just getting into a cab right now instead of waiting for my bag. Also, if I hadn’t checked my bag, I wouldn’t be vomiting violently right now,” I can’t help but think.

 

I wait for my bag for an hour and a half before pleading with an airline rep. He tells me he can’t do anything and charges me a $200 fee for my time.

 

Back at the Boston airport, a handler loads my burnt, beaten, penis-graffiti-covered, barely-structurally-sound bag onto a Xiamen Airlines flight to Chengdu. Seven hours in, an engine fails and the plane is forced to make an emergency landing in the Pacific Ocean. The plane hits the water directly above Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the ocean. As passengers evacuate the plane, my bag sinks below the surface, never to be seen again.