Just because I’m paranoid about losing stuff while traveling, doesn’t mean the fates aren’t trying to take it from me. And this was the kind of trip where they might succeed. I was going to New York and London, to follow up on business opportunities from the JCK Show. But the Company’s Board wanted to keep the momentum going, and I was urged to travel wherever needed.
So I was arranging meetings while already on the road, deciding on travel plans while already traveling—and that’s a recipe for losing stuff. You end up being in a city, or country, for sometimes less than 24 hours, and then you’re racing back to the airport with a suitcase filled with increasingly dirty clothes, and with your organized power cords, reservation materials, and electronics bags increasingly in disarray.
I envy travelers who stay in one place long enough to use the hotel’s laundry service. I only dream of such things. You know, they pick it up by 9am and return it by 7pm. Fine. But how does that work when you’re flight departs at 5:00? But, hey, that’s what hotel sinks are for, right? And don’t tell me sink-washed clothes won’t dry in an hour. Give me an iron, and an ironing board, and I can dry anything. OK, sure, sometimes I burn it in the process. But only once did a pair of underwear actually catch fire. It’s very rare.
What worries me is the risk of a Travel Catastrophe. A Catastrophe would be discovering your wallet’s been stolen when you’re on a Nile River Cruise, and now you have no credit cards. Or your passport gets left at a Kathmandu hotel reception desk, and you’re already on a flight back to India. Or your laptop dies, and the nearest Apple Store to Sierra Leone is in Paris. These are almost “Extinction Level Events” as they say about asteroids crashing to Earth. You simply can’t recover.
Which is why I’m obsessive about avoiding them. It’s why I divide credit cards between billfold, suitcase, and computer bag. I could lose any two, and I won’t be stranded. It’s why I carry two power cords each for the laptop and the iPhone, and keep them separated. It’s why I only travel with shirts and slacks that contain pockets with closeable zippers, to keep billfold and passport as safe as possible. And most importantly, it’s why I tear a hotel room apart before leaving, to make sure not a single USB key or power adapter is hiding in it. I’ve never quite taken a hunting knife and shredded a bed to see I left anything inside the mattress. But that’s only because hunting knives are a problem at airport security.
So it was an experienced and jaded traveler who descended on the country of Jordan at one in the morning, after the 30 minute flight from Tel Aviv. If this place was going to steal one of my power adapters, even a lesser one, it was going to have to work for it.
But I wasn’t working. This was a day off; a forced layover I hadn’t expected. My next meetings, in Dubai, weren’t until Friday. And if you’re trying to go as directly as possible between Tel Aviv and Dubai, you have to stop in Amman. And if you’re in Amman, well, you might as well go explore a bit, right? Jordan, a new country for me, is best known for the ruins at Petra: one of the Seven Wonders of the World. Could I get there and back in one day?
Yes, I determined with some quick emails to the Amman hotel, I could. Just barely. I’d need to hire a car and driver, about $125, which was a small price for seeing a Seven Wonder, or whatever these things are called. At 8am my bag was packed, and I was waiting in the lobby for the driver to arrive,
Ever since leaving London I’d dealt with the stress of not understanding people who were speaking heavily-accented English. Perhaps that was fair because the British probably had trouble understanding me. But I’ve resigned myself to often grasping only a third of what’s spoken, when travelling to unusual places.
Thus I was surprised, upon meeting the driver Rafi, to notice in his first sentence that he spoke English extremely well. I thought maybe it was an American accent, but realized I was just projecting.
Rafi was young (early thirties), slender and swarthy. He was born in Jordan, but his father was Armenian. His Mom was a “Palestinian” (whatever that means.) So he spoke fluent English and Armenian, with Arabic as his native tongue. Not a bad guy to hang out with in the southern deserts of Jordan. We bonded quickly, or at least I did. Heck, Rafi even loved the concept of the Museum of Named Diamonds, and we spent much of the three hour drive talking about how he could be a rep for the company, since his family had close connections with all the jewelry retailers in Jordan. We certainly didn’t have anyone else repping for us in Jordan. Wide open territory, as they say.
I gave him a $100 Museum registration gift card, and urged him to have an intimate dinner with his wife and the two of them could decide what to name their diamond. I promised he’d find it a very romantic experience because it would force them to think back on how they’d first met, and those early emotions, so as to choose the best name. I’d done the same thing with another business contact in Tel Aviv, and made the same promise about it being a very romantic thing to do. “Good,” he’d said. “My wife and I are in the middle of a big fight right now. Maybe this will help.”
Hmmm. A new revenue model for the Museum? Well, I’d once been told that the whole diamond industry was based on only two emotions: love and guilt. We’d been focusing on love. Maybe we could tap into guilt.
I was pulled away from these thoughts when I noticed a highway sign pointing to the Dead Sea. “You have a Dead Sea?” I asked Rafi.
“Oh, yes, it’s very famous, haven’t you heard of it?”
“No, I explained. “I’ve only heard of the one in Israel. I didn’t know Jordan had one too.”
He turned around, not knowing if I was kidding or not.
“Uh, Jacques, it’s the same sea. This is just the Jordan side of it.
OK, whatever. Apparently I wasn’t going to win any geography trivia games on this car ride. But who the heck pays attention to the layout of Jordan? Maybe I would from now on. Here came the sea. Pretty impressive. My eye scanned eagerly for boats.
“Where are the boats?” I asked.
“No boats. It’s dead.”
“Well, yes, I mean for the fish, and stuff. I get that. Too salty. But would that really stop boats?”
“It’s not just the salt. Lots of other minerals are in there. They’d destroy motors, propellers, anything.”
I pondered that. As a former boat builder, I was interested professionally.
“Wait a minute. OK, for anything made of metal, sure. But what about a wood boat? A wood sailboat?”
“Nope. The minerals in the water will destroy anything.”
This seemed really odd. I was tempted to stop the car and toss in a log, and see if it would be devoured in a bubbling cauldron of acidic ooze or something. But then I looked around. Oh yeah. No wood. That’s why it’s called a desert. A dead one, at that.
I do have a good sense of direction and knew we were driving south, along the shore, with the lake to our west. A hauntingly-mysterious, mountainous land rose on the other side, but it looked dead as well.
“What’s over there, to the west. On the far bank?”
“That’s the West Bank.”
“Well, duh, I know it’s the western side of the lake, but ….oh wait, you mean like, THE West Bank? That’s Palestine?”
“Yeah, if you want to call it that. Palestine was never really a country. That’s all just made up.”
So we debated the Israeli/Palestinian issue for another hour, but it wasn’t much of a debate, as we agreed on everything.
Leaving the Dead Sea we followed a serpentine mountainous road to a high elevation, or at least high compared to the Dead Sea which is the lowest spot on Earth. Rafi announced we’d be stopping for tea. It was a primitive road-side hut, with a nice terrace looking over the view, and shielded from the sun by light stringers of bamboo making an overhanging canopy.
It was an impressive view, but there wasn’t much to look at. These mountains, like the lake and the desert, were dead . Not a single piece of shrubbery. Not one goat. Probably the evil vapors from the Dead Sea had consumed them all. And even the desiccated goat bones had blown to dust.
After three hours we arrived in Petra. I noticed lots of little hotels. Restaurants. Sidewalk cafes. But how anyone could sit outside and have tea, in the sweltering cauldron of the Jordanian desert, was more than I could understand. This wasn’t Vienna. The surface temperature of the planet Mercury may be higher than the deserts of Arabia. But I bet it’s not by much.
Rafi dropped me off at the “entrance” for Petra. It was nicely done, with some tourist-oriented, pleasant, modern one-story brick buildings, including washrooms, information resources, maps, and of course a ticket office. The Jordanians aren’t stupid. When you own one of the Seven Wonders, you monetize it. $40 entrance fee. It was too hot to be annoyed. And there’s a psychological factor that when you pay in a foreign currency, especially not a well-known one such as Jordanian dollars which are called “JD’s,” you don’t really think of it as money.
Rafi had warned me of the various scams. Scam #1 was the horses. They’d offer to let you ride a horse down into the Valley of the Crescent Moon, and claim it was free.
“They’re not really horses. Well, OK, they’re horses. But they’re really small. More the size of mules or donkeys. And of course it’s not free. They force you to pay a tip afterwards.”
Scam #2 was the offer to take a guided tour up to the Church. It’s way up on a hill. It takes over an hour to get there. And it’s not worth seeing anyway. Just some small ruins.
Scam #3 was everything else. “They’ll offer you all kinds of stuff, and services, and t-shirts. If I were you, I’d refuse all of it. The prices are crazy and it’s all crap.”
Armed with this valuable advice, I hoisted up my small daypack, made sure it still had the two large bottles of water in it, donned my sunglasses and visor-cap which read “I Solve All My Problems With Duct Tape,” and headed down into the Valley of the Crescent Moon.
I hadn’t even reached the valley itself, when people tried to sell me horse rides. “Take horse, here!” was the common cry. “Is included with price of ticket!” Nope. Not going to fall for it. And speaking of fall, I expected that’s what one of these “horses” would do if I were to climb up on top of the pitiful little things. Then the guides would probably charge me another $100 for breaking their micro-horse. No thanks.
As Rafi had promised, it wasn’t very crowded. Sure, there were people here. Small groups, with nearly 100% of the women wearing Islamic headscarves. That’s a slightly higher percentage than in London these days, but not by much. Anyway, these tourists were Arabic.
“Why not crowded? Is this the low season?” I’d asked.
“No, it’s all that stuff with ISIS and terrorism. Tourists don’t want to come here anymore.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“Of course not. Look around. Do you see any terrorists?”
I didn’t.
In the movie “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” they’d referred to this as the Valley of the Crescent Moon. But as the trail led inexorably downwards it became obvious it wasn’t really a valley. It was more like a miniature canyon, with extremely steep sides, close together. The sides of the canyon were beautiful, with interesting shapes and colors and patterns. As a geology minor I recognized what’s called aeolian erosion: formations caused by the wind. I tried to imagine the desert sandstorms which could have wrecked such havoc, and left behind such beauty. It was sandblasting as an art-form.
Rafi had explained the important thing to see at Petra, the center of it all, was the Tradgery.
I wasn’t sure what a Tradgery was, but assumed it was a local word—probably borrowed from the ancient tribe of Nabataeans—nomadic Arabs which had created this place sometime between when it was conquered by Alexander the Great and when Christ was born on the western bank of that nearby Dead Sea. No one is quite sure when Petra was built. But reading the little information placards that had been set along the trail, I realized they were referring to something called the Treasury.
Treasury? Tradgery? OK, Rafi needed to work on his pronunciation. I’d help him when I got back to the car. The “Treasury” is the famous building at Petra, the stone temple or palace carved directly into the rock wall. It’s called a treasury because for a hundred years or so, at some time in the past, local thieves had used it to store their loot. From that, the legend had grown that it was once the treasury building of the Nabataeans themselves. “Sorry to disappoint you,” said the placard. “But it was actually a mortuary.”
So it had a religious purpose, not a financial one. It was a tomb. OK, fine. But was that before or after the Templar Knight took up station inside, guarding the Holy Grail? The one from the Indiana Jones movie. The placard didn’t say.
I’d been walking half an hour through this winding canyon when the first glimpse of the building itself appeared. Perhaps the creators had arranged this effect intentionally, in their placement. As you approach, you see a narrow tantalizing glimpse of it. Then a little more. And then finally the whole thing stands there, framed perfectly and artistically by the canyon walls.
I remembered my first glimpse of another “7 wonder,” the Leaning Tower of Pisa, when I’d been appalled at how tiny it was. Who cared if it fell over? It was too small to matter. The Treasury at Petra was the opposite. It was huge. I couldn’t believe the size of the thing. You don’t really grasp that, from pictures. The scale is elusive.
And it was beautiful. The classic Greek architecture (we’re talking around the time of Alexander, remember) looked like it had been flown in directly from the Parthenon in Athens: tall columns of stone with delicate Corinthian flower patterns at the top. But of course these columns hadn’t been flown in from anywhere. What makes Petra’s Treasury unique is that the whole thing is carved into the mountain itself. To paraphrase what sculptors sometimes say: This beautiful thing had always been there, hidden inside the rock. The stone cutters simply removed the parts that were in the way.
Folks had been trying to sell me stuff all through the canyon: headscarves, postcards, and one tried to push his camel on me. I wasn’t interested.
Well, OK, the camel was kind of cool. But I’d done the camel thing. They say about boat ownership: The two best days of your life are the day you buy the boat, and the day you sell the boat. With camels it would be: the two best parts of the experience are the time you first get on the camel, and the time you are allowed to get off the camel.
And that’s all there is to say about camels.
But as I was taking pictures of the magnificent Treasury building, or carving, or whatever it was, a young boy came up with a far more compelling service to offer. “I can show best place for picture. Know best place.”
OK, he had me at “best place for picture.” This was the mother of all photo ops, and I wanted to do it justice. “Where?” I asked. He pointed to a particular spot over against the far canyon wall. Hmmm. Yeah, that might be a nice angle. But of course I needed to somehow be in it. I needed to find someone to take the picture.
“Will you help me?” I asked.
He was quite willing to help me. The ten year old desert urchin morphed quickly into Artistic Director for the shoot. He positioned me just so. Moved off a bit for the best angle. Tried a different one. Finally, tentatively satisfied, he did the 1-2-3 countdown, and snapped the picture. He looked at it on the screen, shook his head. And tried a few others. He came over and showed me results. They were spectacular. But the composition wasn’t quite right. He had the treasury building growing out of my head. I explained that it would be better if I were just to the side of it—a slightly different angle. He grasped this immediately, and took another dozen. These were perfect.
Of course now he would demand a big tip, and he deserved it. But when I tried to pay, he shook his head.
“Not allowed,” he said. “Not allowed to take free money, for nothing.”
“It’s not for nothing! You helped me!”
“Not allowed. Only allowed if take you on tour. Up to church. Or on horse. Then, you can pay.”
What!!??! Was he serious? He wouldn’t take money? A boy guide, in the Middle East, at a tourist attraction, refusing a tip? What sort of alternate universe had I fallen into? Was the Valley of the Crescent Moon actually a weird time/space portal in which everything was “opposite day?”
I tried again to press money on him, but the result was the same. “Take you to Church. Take you on horse. Then can pay me. No allow take money for nothing.”
Well, I guess it was possible that the authorities, realizing what a pain all these pushy guides could be, had organized a new legal framework under which no money could pass unless some defined threshold of “significant services” had been delivered. Hard to believe something like that could actually be organized and executed on effectively in a place like this. But stranger things have happened. OK, maybe stranger things haven’t happened, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t.
Finally, despite my best efforts to give the poor kid money, I gave up. Shrugging my shoulders, I headed further down the valley.
He was not pleased at this. And kept pitching the Church, for an ever lower price. Of course he hadn’t mentioned price yet. They never do. They just know the adjective “low.” Everything is “low price.” “For you, very low price.” “OK, OK. I give you even better low price.”
Coming from the diamond industry, I understand bargaining, but these guides are always bargaining with themselves, as we call it. It wasn’t like I’d made a bid, he’d made an offer, and now we were trying to find a place in the middle to meet. I had zero interest in going to the Church. The price/demand curve was utterly flat.
I’ve noticed this before in such places. The touts are one-dimensional, and think only of price. They don’t realize they need to work on the demand side of the equation. They’re offering stuff no one wants. This young guide could have made a significant sale easily with this simple statement: “OK, you’re right. The Church tour sucks. How ‘bout this. You’re alone and need someone to take pictures for you. I’ve proven how good I am. Let me hang out with you and play photographer. I can show you some great places. Working together, we can take some fantastic photos. That’s what the whole point of this thing is, right? Facebook selfies, right? But we can do better than that. Way better.”
A pitch like that would probably have earned him a $10 bill. Or several thousand Jordanian dollars, depending on the exchange rate.
In truth, once you’re done at the Tradgery, there’s not much more to see. OK, sure, there’s a nice Greek-style amphitheater, also carved out of rock. But it’s pretty worn down. And some interesting holes in some interesting rock formations, where no doubt people lived. The real problem was that I needed to find a restroom. I should have used the one back at the entrance. Most of the water I was drinking was evaporating out of me as fast as I consumed it. But not all. And that was the problem. Hmmm….
OK, no restrooms around here, that’s for sure. But if I climbed up into those rock formations a bit, I might just be able to get behind one of them sufficiently to take care of business. It would require what we call in Colorado “scrambling” – using your hands as well as your feet to climb over rocks. But I managed it. Yes, this was going to work. I couldn’t climb out of the canyon itself, that was way too steep. But I could find a place to hide for thirty seconds. Then I noticed a problem. A very young girl, maybe 7 or 8, very cute, was climbing up after me, hollering something to me. It sounded like: “Not allowed! Not allowed on rocks!” But I might have misunderstood. And was this the best job the rock Nazis could do by way of enforcement police? I was tempted to yell back: “Yeah, you and whose army’s going to stop me?” But I didn’t want to be rude, and maybe it was against the rules, and maybe peeing at Petra was an outrageous insult to religious interests in any case. But there are some things you just can’t legislate against.
She wouldn’t stop following me. Dammit! No way could I take a pee with a young girl right there. Forget religious sacrilege. I’d probably get arrested for indecent exposure and go on some lifelong Jordanian list of sex predators. I hated to do it, but I finally let myself get angry at her, and I did the go-away arm gesture, several times. Finally she got the message and turned back, climbing like a miniature mountain goat over those rocks that had posed such a challenge for me. Poor little thing. I felt awful. Probably she’d just wanted to help me take a selfie or something. Well, there’s a time and a place for selfies, and this wasn’t it.
My urgent task completed I headed back to the Treasury, to see if I could go inside, but the little photographer intercepted me. Realizing his pitch for a larger gig had failed, he now found those rules against taking “free money” less compelling.
“OK to take money,” he said, on seeing me. “OK to take money.”
I found the coins and happily handed them over, glad both to discharge some guilt, and also to learn that Middle Eastern touts hadn’t become Mother Theresa. The “can’t take free money” scam was just another to add to the list, along with the one about the free horses.
Rafi had explained that you used to be able to go inside the Treasury building, but (a) there wasn’t much there to see, just some empty rooms, and (b) right now it was under construction he thought, and you couldn’t go in at all. This proved to be true. A big gate guarded the entrance. Well, I guess with a name like Treasury, it made sense that security was taken seriously. No access to those empty rooms for me. The quest for the Holy Grail had ended.
But the quest for the perfect t-shirt had just begun. Returning up the valley, I walked determinedly to the t-shirt stands, and the touts swarmed over me, offering me low price, low price, for t-shirts. As a serious t-shirt shopper, I knew the hard part would be (a) finding one I liked, and (b) finding it in my size. T-shirt rule-of-thumb in exotic countries: Assume the size is two sizes below what it says. They just measure things differently, and can never quite believe how large Americans are. I wanted at least XL.
I scanned the designs. They were all horrible except for one. It was perfect. I loved it. I had to have it. Regardless of the price. Not that it wouldn’t be low, of course. I made my needs known, and the proprietor went crazy looking for one in an XL or larger, but he couldn’t find anything bigger than an M. Realizing this wouldn’t do, he took me on a guided tour of the other shops, asking each in turn, and they each in turn hunted desperately thru the piles. Not a lot of traffic at Petra these days. And here was the one tourist who did arrive, and who did want a t-shirt, and—dammit—he only wanted the one, and he had to have it in XL. The gods were cruel! The t-shirt salesmen were almost pulling out their hair, but it was no use. The one I wanted didn’t exist.
I sympathized with them, and thanked them for their efforts, but finally began walking away.
Then, at the last minute, one of them came running up to me. He’d found it! He’d found the perfect t-shirt. I checked the label on the acrylic sleeve. Yep! XL. Perfect! Everyone was thrilled. I paid them the asking price, which was only a few dollars, and knew they’d earned it.
Note: Two days later, in my hotel room, I finally had time to open up the package and try on the t-shirt. It was just as nice as I’d remembered, with beautiful artwork in a white on navy blue color scheme. Darn. I should have bought one for my daughter Kristen. These were her favorite colors, and were also her school colors at Middlebury. And she’d always wanted to go to Petra. Kristen would appreciate this shirt more than I would.
Wait a minute. This wasn’t XL. It wasn’t even L. It was a Medium—the same size as the one I’d originally discovered. How could… Oh. Duh. They’d switched this shirt into an XL package!!!! How could I have been so gullible! They’d cheated me!!!
No wait. I’d cheated them. I’d already decided I should have gotten this shirt for Kristen, not me. In truth I’m sort of over “destination” t-shirts these days. They’re more fun as gifts. And now, just when I was regretting not getting a Medium one for Kristen, in place of one for me, magically I ended up with a Medium! LOL! Fooled you, evil t-shirt merchants!! Who’s laughing now? Payback’s a bitch, ain’t it? Of course they probably wouldn’t care, but that didn’t matter. I’d walked away the winner, that was for sure. And their karma was in the tank.
Anyway, that discovery came later. For now, I headed back to the parking lot, where Rafi would be waiting. He’d told me to text him as I was leaving the Tradgery, so he could plan when to be back, but when I arrived he was nowhere in sight. I called his mobile.
“But you just texted me, just now!” he said. We finally realized the message hadn’t actually sent (been delivered) until the time when I arrived at the parking lot—causing Rafi to be late. The problem was obvious: Cell phone reception just isn’t what it could be, in the Valley of the Crescent Moon.
“By the way, Rafi, it’s not a Tradgery. It’s a TREASURY.”
“Yeah, that’s what I said, Tradgery.”
“No, your pronunciation is wrong. English speakers won’t understand it. It sounds like you’re saying tragedy, or something. It’s TREA-SU-RY.”
“I know. That’s what I said. Tradgery.”
“TREASURY.”
“Yeah. Tradgery.”
We agreed to disagree on that and went back to debating the middle east, where there still wasn’t much daylight between our positions.
My flight left at 2:15 in the morning which is an awkward departure time. Is that an early early flight? Or a late late flight? Do you sleep first, or just stay up late? Or what? Given that I could arrive back at the Amman airport by 4:30pm, from Petra, and given that there was an airport hotel (called Airport Hotel, easy to remember), I organized it this way. Using Rafi’s mobile-phone-generated hotspot while we drove through the desert, I used Expedia to secure a great rate at Airport Hotel, and I was asleep by 6pm. (Thank you, sleeping pills.) I’d actually taken my morning shower before going to bed—all that dust and grime from Petra—and had even packed. I’d need to merely toss my business clothes on for my meeting the next day in Dubai, pack up my laptop bag, and take the shuttle to the airport to arrive at 12:15am. I’d set the alarm for 11:30pm, and enjoy a full 5 hours of sleep. Then, with plenty of coffee doing the heavy lifting, I’d get three hours of work done on my laptop on the flight to Dubai. Good plan, huh?
I had no way of knowing a Travel Catastrophe was about to occur. My first one ever. The thing I’d always dreaded.
It began well. I caught the shuttle and arrived at the airport by 12:15am—perfect. Security is different in every city. In Tel Aviv, for example, you can take a bottle of water through, no problem. They’d shoot you for that in London. But Amman security was pretty strict. No water. Belt off. Shoes off. Watch, iPhone, coins…all of it in a little bin. OK, no problem.
I made it through the x-ray machine or whatever it is and waited for my bags. Laptop bag came first, but a security guard needed to check it and I nodded permission.
Here came my other bag, but I couldn’t deal with it yet as I was trying to get myself organized. Belt on. Shoes on. Watch. Cell phone. Coins. Boarding pass still with me. Billfold in the zippered pocket. Carryon-bag retrieved. I just needed the laptop bag, which was now sitting there on the table, with the security guard more interested in another one. I gestured towards it and asked if he was done.
“Yes, done. All finished. You take.”
I reclaimed my bag and connected it to the wheeled carry-on, thus completing the ritual. Now fully re-assembled as a road warrior, I went off to find breakfast.
Two hours later, Emirates Flight 817 reached cruising altitude and we were invited to use our electronic devices. Fully caffeinated, I was eager to attack my backlog of work from two weeks of meetings on the road.
At 3 in the morning, everyone else was asleep, and the cabin lights were off. All the better. I’d been plagued by screaming kids every flight so far.
I pulled out my bag and opened the laptop compartment. It was empty. What the hell? I must have put it in the main compartment so I checked there. Nope. OK, it must have been in the first one. I just hadn’t checked thoroughly. I checked again. Nope. Rising panic. OK, it was in the main compartment, under some papers and stuff, and I needed to recheck that one again. Nope.
The laptop was gone.
It was a Travel Catastrophe of 10 on the Richter scale.
It was akin to losing a passport plus the backup paper copy of the passport. Or all credit cards from all three locations. It was far worse than losing my iPhone because I had a backup iPhone. But I didn’t have a backup computer.
I wanted to scream, pull my hair out, and start throwing things. But everyone was asleep. I remembered that 2005 Jody Foster film, “Flight Plan” where she literally loses her 4 year old daughter while on a trans-Atlantic night flight. And she can’t get anyone’s attention to even help her. I felt like that now. And what could anyone do? The laptop was obviously back at my hotel. Despite my pathological obsession with clearing a room, I’d somehow screwed up.
Maybe, I reasoned, when I’d flipped open the sheets on the bed, to make sure nothing was under them, the sheets had fallen back on the laptop that maybe was sitting on the bed. And I hadn’t realized it. That could have been it. I’d done my normal tearing apart of the room. Some dreadful arrangement of sheets and blankets was the only explanation for how I could have missed The Single Most Important Object To Not Leave Behind.
I had three hours before the plane landed. My mobile phone had picked up an email from the guy in Dubai, needing to postpone the meeting to Sunday morning. Thank God. With my laptop missing, I’d be a basket case anyway. I needed my energies focused on Recovery Plan A. Problem was, I had no Recovery plan A. Or B. Or C.
I again tried to figure out how it could have happened, but decided the details didn’t matter. I’d screwed up bigtime, and the fact that I had—despite the obsessive care I take not to—was gnawing at my soul. Would I really have to start carrying a hunting knife and start tearing up hotel beds after all, from now on? How come other people don’t lose stuff? OK, sure. They lose a sock. One sock. I lose a laptop.
The information in the seatback explained there was free Wi-Fi on this flight. Really? Wi-Fi? Free? Emirates had recently won “best airline in the world” honors, for something like the 6th year in a row, and this was obviously one of the reasons.
I’d recently installed the Skype app on my iPhone, meaning I could make calls for free, to landlines, if I had an Internet signal. 15 minutes later I was locked in a toilet stall, talking to the night manager or whomever he was at Airport Hotel reception desk. Sort of. The clarity of the call was good, but the clarity of his accent made him almost unintelligible. Yet he was able to convey this blunt message: He couldn’t help me. It was 3 in the morning. And I needed to call back at 9:30 when housekeeping would open.
“But this is an emergency!”
The line went dead. I don’t think he’d hung up on me. The Skype line had dropped.
Or he’d hung up on me. Anyway, apparently even after landing, I’d need to wait 3 hours to find out if they had my laptop. OK, time to get serious about Recovery Plan Alpha. There were two choices. They had my laptop, or they didn’t. But I was sure they had it. Where else could it be? So let’s assume, when I was able to make contact, the answer would be “we have your laptop.”
What then? How do you get a laptop from Amman, Jordan to a hotel in Dubai? And how do you do it in 48 hours or less?
Especially when the weekend had just started in Dubai. (It starts on Friday, which was today.) Even if it could get to Dubai by tomorrow (the equivalent of Dubai’s Sunday) you’d never get it delivered. FedEx won’t deliver on a Sunday even in the States. And a high-value item? Crossing borders? Customs declarations? It could take a week. I’d be long gone.
Could they send it to my next stop: Bombay, India? Well sure. But I was only going to be there 24 hours. And trusting anything to happen smoothly in India is a bad idea.
Most importantly, I needed the laptop today! I had an urgent business proposal to send back to London. This was the flight where I was supposed to be writing it. And my laptop was key to all my other meetings as well. In fact, details of them were on the laptop!
Did I have it all backed up? Well sure, via Carbonite, the cloud-based automatic backup system. My files were still all up there in the cloud somewhere. But a full-restore onto a new laptop would take about 36 hours assuming a fast Internet connection. I’d have to get on the phone with tech support. And that’s assuming I could even buy a new laptop in Dubai.
Well, of course I could buy a laptop in Dubai—probably the number 1 shopping destination on the planet. And most of the files I needed I could access via web-based email, as they’d been sent already to colleagues. That meant they could be easily retrieved from the Sent folder. But buying a whole new laptop? God, that would so suck.
Another idea occurred to me. We were scheduled to arrive in Dubai at 6:30am. It was only a three hour flight from Amman. Would it be possible to turn around and fly back? And then grab the laptop at the hotel. (“Airport Hotel,” remember?) And then fly back once more to Dubai?
That sounded crazy, but was it really? When you’re hit with a Travel Catastrophe, nothing’s off the table.
The free Internet was proving valuable. Yes, it could be done. Not on Emirates but via Royal Jordanian. The cost was about $800. A new MacBook Air would be about $1200. I checked via the free Internet. And yes, there was even an Apple Store in Dubai. At Emirates Mall. OK, that was an option. My hotel was close to Emirates Mall.
So we had two options: Buy an $800 round trip ticket back to Amman, returning the same day. I’d lose a day of work. But that was baked into the cake already. And I’d lose $800. But I’d have my own laptop back. And all the files. Not the world’s craziest idea.
But it only made sense if they truly had my laptop at the hotel. What if they said it wasn’t there. Not likely, but what if? I couldn’t book the ticket until I knew there was a laptop waiting for me to grab quickly, and then go back through airport security and…
Wait a minute. Airport security. Hmmm. Might the laptop have been removed at airport security, not put back, and NO ONE TOLD ME!!???!!!! Was such a thing remotely possible?
I replayed the events my sleepy brain had recorded. It was chaotic. There had been a few brief moments when my eye had not been on that laptop bag, while getting my belt on and stuff. It was possible. Not likely, but possible. And if the hotel said “no laptop,” then it was even more possible. But, hell, how does one contact airport security in Amman, Jordan, when you don’t speak the language, and you’re already hundreds of miles away in another country? And even if they had it, what then? They’d be unlikely to be able to organize something like a FedEx or DHL shipment. I wouldn’t trust TSA staff to handle something like that in America, with both parties speaking the same language. OK, no reason to cross that bridge yet. It was almost certain to be at the hotel.
A few hours later I was sitting at a Starbucks in Dubai airport, using my Skype app to reach the front desk. This time I got more than a sleepy hotel clerk. The man put me on hold for almost 20 minutes and then reported back: No laptop. I couldn’t believe it. I was sure they must have checked the wrong room, or hadn’t looked under those sheets, or whatever.
But there was a limit to what I could do. The chances of getting my laptop back, or even of finding my laptop, we’re fading quickly. But I went through the motions of checking at the Royal Jordanian ticket counter, and one more option was crossed off. The Expedia ticket price was not available for flights on the same day. I could fly there and back, but it would cost $1300.
Plan B was looking better: Buy a new laptop. Advantages: You’ll get a laptop today and be able to start working by mid-afternoon. You’ll have the presentation materials you’ll need for your meeting the following day, and the meetings for the rest of the trip. You won’t be dependent on a laptop trying to catch up with you and probably failing, even if it is found.
And you’ll have a brand new laptop. Mine was already 4 years old. That’s an eternity, in computer time. A new one would be nice. And if you’re going to spend over a thousand dollars, wouldn’t it be better to spend it on a new computer, rather than flying back and forth over Saudi Arabia?
The recovery plan was coming into focus. In fact, my logical brain deduced that even if the laptop were found today, it made more sense to use the money to buy a new laptop immediately. And if it was never found, then that was the only plan.
I headed to Emirates Mall and the shiny Apple Store was as smoothly efficient and helpful as always. The Chinese sales clerk, when she heard the story, said: “Are you aware we can locate the laptop, remotely?”
I’d forgotten that Apple has this weird technology for being able to do that, but I couldn’t imagine it would work unless the machine was turned on. She went to her slick state-of-the-art iPad and summoned various computer genies, then turned to me, disappointed. “Sorry, we can’t find, unless it is turned on.”
OK, well, I was almost grateful. If Apple had technology that could detect laptops even when they were powered off, Big Brother was growing rapidly. The Civil Libertarian in me rebelled, even while the accountant in me was disappointed.
“However, we can also lock it, remotely, from here,” she said. “The moment it is turned on, it will lock and a message will be displayed which you can type, right here, from the store.”
So we did all that. I’d set the message to read: “Help! This laptop has been lost or stolen. Please contact me at _____. Reward!” It was a small consolation. No one was going to hack their way into it and learn all my company’s business secrets. Of course, we didn’t have any, but still.
As I worked away in my hotel room, trying to download a trial version of MS Office for recovery purposes, I remembered Rafi. I’d friended him yesterday. I hated to bother Rafi with my problem, but this is what friends are for, right? If he—the coolly competent speaker of Arabic, Armenian, and English—couldn’t find this laptop, no one could.
We began communicating by instant messenger, and he rose to the challenge. An hour later he was at the Airport Hotel, but eventually reported back: “It’s not here. We’ve torn the room apart, and the lost and found, and the whole place. I’m convinced. They don’t have the laptop.”
So we next discussed airport security. While there is no way I’d have known how to even contact Amman security staff myself, Rafi was already at the airport (“Airport Hotel”.) Over the next thirty minutes, strange messages begin coming from him.
“Can you please describe your laptop,” he asked. I did so.
“Are there any distinguishing marks on it,” he followed up with.
No, there weren’t. It was a silver MacBook Air. 13”
“Can you send me your password,” he asked about ten minutes later.
What? Password? Why did they need that? My laptop was either there or it wasn’t. I texted him back. “Wait, do they have it or don’t they? Why do you need the password?”
Back came the reply: “You wouldn’t believe how many laptops they have here! There’s a whole room filled with laptops! A whole room!”
And in a flash of understanding, everything became clear. Of course that’s what had happened. They’d taken the laptop out of my bag, and run it through the scanner separately. Some places do this, some don’t. Yet no one on Earth—except Amman security apparently—does this secretly, without telling you they’re doing it. And gives you the bag back, with the laptop missing.
So of course they had piles and piles of laptops. How could they not? There’s probably never been as efficient a system of separating laptops from travelers as the one in full swing at Jordan’s airport.
I wondered what their harvesting ratio was. Probably less than 100%. Not everyone would fall for it. But I couldn’t imagine it being less than 50%. Amman—for all its Bedouin heritage—is a modern, thriving, business-oriented city, and travelers with laptops are constantly coming and going. To be precise; coming with laptops, going without them. And speaking of Bedouin heritage, well, weren’t they always known as the cleverest thieves on the planet?
I visualized how it must work. They’d keep a laptop for maybe thirty days, for the unlikely case of a traveler managing to come back to Jordan to retrieve the stolen item. Then, after a suitable interval, they’d wipe the hard disk (“with a cloth” to use Hillary-speak), reinstall a bootlegged copy of an operating system, and sell the thing for hundreds of dollars. That’s probably half a year’s wage, to an airport security worker in Jordan. These guys were getting rich. And no one could accuse them of stealing, exactly.
Rafi had said there was a whole room full of laptops.
“Ya think??!!?” I messaged back. “I’m not surprised!!!”
I sent him the password.
Now there were more messages from Rafi. “You need to send me a photo of your passport, and a letter authorizing me to pick up the computer.”
This was sounding encouraging. “Do they definitely have it?” I wrote back.
“Yes, but they don’t want to give it up. Not without a lot of documentation.”
Yeah, no kidding. I bet they didn’t want to give it up. They were probably already spending the money in their mind, in a carnival mood from having nabbed a top of the line MacBook Air. Now, an Arabic-speaking Armenian from hell had caught up with them, and was going to spoil the party.
It wasn’t easy to get the necessary documents to Jordan in just a few minutes, with my new laptop and incomplete software, but in the end the thing was done. Once he was away from the Amman laptop mafia, Rafi called me and we debriefed.
“I owe you big time. I owe you so much I can’t even comprehend the amount.”
“Yeah, you do. I can’t even comprehend it either,” he joked.
But seriously, he’d spent almost four hours of his own time helping me get my laptop back. I couldn’t give him my first born. Erik was grown and married, and with a wife and child of his own. OK, well, I’d find some way to compensate him. I would devote my life to it. It was even time to consider “close friend” status on Facebook. Not that he’d probably accept me, of course.
We agreed on an action plan. Since I already had a new laptop, and since the odds of trying to arrange for the old one to catch up with me on this trip were slim, and since we were both exhausted from the efforts of the day, he was going to take it home with him and we’d worry about it later. Probably I could find a not-too-expensive way to send it to my U.S. address, and a month from now, I’d have my laptop again. Or more precisely, I’d have two laptops.
Which meant: next time I headed out, I could have a full backup computer with me if I wished. That had seemed impractical and unnecessary before. Now it seemed like a minimum. Maybe I needed three.
OK, kidding aside, was the Great Jordanian Laptop Swindle truly a criminal enterprise? Or was Amman security just so breathtakingly incompetent and insensitive and careless that they could remove laptops willy-nilly, give bags back to travelers, and not bother to mention they no long had their computer in them?
Hmmm. You could argue it either way. But the fact that they didn’t want to give up the laptop, even when Rafi had established ownership by virtue of knowing the password, was suspicious. They should have been thrilled that one, at least, of the growing mountain of laptops could be returned to its rightful owner. It hadn’t sounded like they were thrilled.
A culture which could swap a size-marking on a t-shirt was fully capable of maliciously snarfing laptops from travelers. On the other hand, Occam’s Razor (the simplest explanation is probably the correct one) would suggest that assuming an off-the-charts level of ineptitude by airport security personnel might be the better theory.
My own incompetence in letting it happen in the first place? None, obviously. Assigning guilt to others was far more satisfying.
Is there a happy ending? Well, you have to work to find one, but let’s try this.
(A) I upgraded my four year old laptop to a brand new one, and I’m already thrilled at the improvements.
(B) I now have a backup laptop (or will within a month or so) and I’ve always wanted a spare.
(C) The Museum of Named Diamond’s newest marketing rep for Jordan was put through a crucible of fire and emerged triumphant. He was definitely “Museum Material.” We may even be talking a “Senior Curator” title.
(D) On a spiritual level I hadn’t foolishly left my laptop back in the hotel after all. Instead, I’d been introduced to a new danger, and would adjust my procedures accordingly. Anything that doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.
Most importantly, (E) The ultimate Travel Catastrophe had happened, and I’d survived it.
Unlike Indiana Jones, I hadn’t come out of the Valley of the Crescent Moon with the Holy Grail or the gift of immortality. But at least my laptop had earned a second life, and arguably its owner with it. Plus I had a really cool t-shirt for my daughter.
There was much to be thankful for.
Jacques Voorhees 