On a recent flight out of our beautiful city , Calgary, I was rather perplexed. Here I was faced with the dilemma of loading my own luggage onto the luggage rack and waiting for the computer to scan the baggage tag. It all sounds very futuristic and makes a lot of sense as it would make available another person to help in a different department.

The only problem was it didn’t work.

It was quite funny and eventually the lovely check in lady (I am not going to mention the airline] was laughing with us as we tried multiple times to position the suitcase in just the right position so that the computer could see the baggage tag and scan properly. The first time we put it in we were standing too close to it so she asked us to back off a little because she said the computer had issues with personal space. OK I get that. I’m a bit like that too. So we backed off a little and still no luck.

So we repositioned suit case a couple of different times and eventually YAY success!  My bag trundled its way into the underworld of suitcases and actually came out the other end in Edmonton. So what is the lesson in this?

It’s that people are better than computers.

Now I know a lot of different services at the airport are becoming more computerized. Let’s face it we are now checking in ourselves at self-service kiosks and even printing our own baggage tags.  fastening my first baggage tag to my suitcase was a bit of a challenge but with the help of, yes, a person standing nearby in a uniform I was able to attach the baggage tag in the correct manner so that the computer would not be able to screen it.  When it came to loading my baggage …….here we go again. You get my drift it’s all very well to be very technical and yes I can see that in the future maybe it will all start working perfectly well but in the meantime it provides a source of irritation to some or amusement in our case. It made me chuckle as well because it reminded me of that very funny comedy program little Britain where one of the characters dresses up as a travel agent who’s working on his computer that consistently says no ……take a look.