The Car Seat Ordeal

I saw that my recent post on the very good very bad day, and the car seat loss, was picked up by Mir Kamin over at blogher.com. So I figured I might as well fill you all in on the REST OF THE STORY.

So, it's 1 AM, we put the nasty awful disgusting rental seat in our nice clean car and head off for our hotel. Michael gave them all the next day to find our seat and call us, but no call. So the next morning we called them up and gave them our info. Nobody knew where the seat was, and they said that it hadn't been tagged properly so it was just floating around airport-world without any easy way to find it.

Later that day, we got a call. They'd found it. It was in Missoula and they would send it up to Kalispell that night and deliver it the next morning. We could trade it out for our rental and be done with it.

The next morning, still no car seat. Several dozen phone calls, and several days later, nobody has the faintest idea where it might be, but maybe it was rerouted to Salt Lake City (?!) from Missoula en route to Kalispell. They will keep looking.

Finally, on Thursday, the seat has been lost for almost a week. After a long line of useless employees, Michael found one that seemed to have a brain and kept her phone number. Amanda, the intelligent employee (and perhaps the ONLY one in existence), called us up and said that they didn't know where the seat was and it would take a while to find it. We had two options. 1) Go buy a new one. Gee, that's easy in Stevensville, MT. At the gas station? or 2) Keep theirs. When they found ours they would send it to us. So Michael asked the obvious question: So what if you never find ours? She said we could keep their dirt-cheap hair-covered piece of junk. Or work it through corporate and try to get our money back later.

We said thanks but no thanks. Michael took a whole morning of our vacation to make the hour drive to Missoula, drive around and try four different stores until he found the one acceptable car seat in the city, purchase it, and drive home.

When we checked in the next day, Amanda was extremely apologetic and put special priority tags on all our luggage. She was great and we were grateful for her help and we generally liked the new seat, even though the colors were reminiscent of, well, unsavory bodily fluids. We checked everything with a sigh of relief and went on our way.

We arrived in Louisville several hours later and waited at the luggage pickup. We found our bags. And waited. And waited.

You guessed it, they lost it AGAIN! Michael just about blew a sprocket.

Fortunately, this time they found it (in Chicago) and the seat was delivered the next day at 1 AM by an unfortunate employee who had to drive three hours just to get to our home. Sheesh, what an ordeal!

We have had a major piece of baby equipment lost or damaged every single flight this year. We've already gotten a brand new stroller (thank you Delta) and now a brand new car seat (thank you United!) And the airline companies wonder why they are always in the red?!!!