I probably had about a dozen ideas throughout my week of vacation as to what I'd blog about when I got back to B/CS.  Instead of writing about sneaking onto the court of an empty Assembly Hall, figuring out my new iPhone (thank you, Mom and Dad) or pleading with some rich local person to open a Steak n Shake franchise in the Twin Cities, I decided to begin my return to work with the end of my trip.

I don't know that there is a much worse feeling for a traveller than making it to their final destination, only to find out their luggage didn't follow suit.  If you haven't felt that deflation, my congratulations to you.  Hopefully, you don't have to ever.

According to the Department of Transportation's latest numbers (from January 2008), the odds are in your favor.  Only .737% of those who boarded 727s, 747s and any other airline plane had their baggage mishandled in January.  The USDOT doesn't note how many of those bags wound up back in their owners' hands, though one expert claims it's 98% on average.  Granted, the expert's name ("Coffey") doesn't match up with his website's URL, but then again, neither does my name and my blog ("Fullhart" has two Ls contrary to this URL as of this writing).

So I fell into that small fraction that had mishandled bags, though they were handled right back to me the next day.  Computer tagging seems to have a flair for finding all that luggage.  I just envision something out of the Monsters, Inc. door storage room carrying those thousands of bags around.  Of course, much like with your local post office, you likely won't ever get a behind-the-scenes view of those transfer systems in this post-9/11 world.

I guess being part of less than one percent of a huge group is cool.  Apparently, my other new electronic toy will fail less than one percent of the time.  Apparently, less than one percent of office-based plastic surgery patients have complications (?).

Of course, apparently less than one percent of Houstonians, San Antonians, Austinites and Metroplexians use public transportation, though the gas price rise may be changing that as it seems to be here.  Hopefully, those riders' bags don't get lost in the journey.