Megan and Clara in India

This is what happened.

I took a trip to Florida and prepaid for the bags I was checking on Spirit Airlines. They charge you $20 per bag. Seems ridiculous that I have to pay to bring clothes with me, but what else can you do? I paid for the bags. Everything was fine until I got to the airport to come home. That is when they told me that I did not prepay for any bags.

Sure I did.

No, you didn't.

I didn't have the receipt so I had to pay again. I paid for one bag and decided to carry the other. But I forgot that it had dangerous liquids in it, so I had to throw out the shampoo and mouthwash. It was irritating, but I figured that I would eventually get reimbursed. I just didn't know that I had to first get through the Department of Customer Defense in India.

I found all the proper receipts to prove my case and checked out the Spirit website at www.spiritair.com. There I found the Customer Service number, which I called. The woman on the other end had only learned English (as we know it) recently and was hard to understand. But one thing she made clear was that all the fees I paid did not include bags.

Yes, I know that, I tell her. That is because I paid later, after making the reservation, but I still paid. We didn't really connect on this. At one point she thought I was saying my bags are lost.

Finally she tells me I should call the baggage people. Fine, I thought, maybe they would understand this complicated baggage situation. She gave me the toll free number and I called it. But the Baggage People did not answer. Instead I got a recording telling me that I could get Exciting Adult Talk by calling another number.

Hmm. I thought for a moment about how the promise of exciting talk is much better than arguing with "Megan" in India. But then again, I might get the same woman on the phone. So I went back to their web page to look for clues on how to break this fortress.

They don't have any other numbers nor any addresses on the website. But they do have a "Feedback" link. Perhaps I could leave a message and maybe someone would help me.

Unfortunately, the Feedback page is just answers to a few common questions. The only feedback is what you are saying to the computer screen, and they can't hear that. Hopefully your kids don't hear it either.

Back to Customer Service two more times. I just kept thinking that eventually I would reach someone who understood me and would do something. I was naive. "Clara" told me in a thick accent that every time you change your flight date (as I did) you have to re-buy your checked bags. You don't get a refund for the original bags, you just buy them again.

That can't be, I told her. "Yes, you must pay for them again unless you transfer your SSR." But what is an SSR? I don't even know what that is. Clara tells me that an SSR is your bags.

"Look," I say, "Is there a mailing address that I can write to, at your headquarters?"

"Yes," she says, "The address is info@spiritair.com."

"No. Is there a mailing address at the main building in Mirimar, Florida??"

"We don't have that," she tells me from the other side of the planet.

Well I knew that info@toughshitair.com was not going to help me any, so I paused. I'm not going to win this. They have stopped me from getting any sort of satisfaction or even a normal conversation.

That is when Al pointed me to a web site where other people complained about Spirit Airlines. On that page there was the email address of the Vice President of Customer Relations.

Jackpot.

I wrote a nice email to Mr. Lefebvre and told him of the problem and that I had tried with no success to communicate with 3 people in Customer Disservice. This at least gave me some satisfaction. I mean, it will probably go into a black hole, but at least I had the last written word.

But only 14 minutes later, Mr. Lefebvre wrote me back from his Blackberry! I imagine he was in a meeting about something really boring (like how we could charge customers for seatbelts) and decided that he might as well read his mail, but he really did write to me. He told me that someone would look into it for me. Wow!

I was surprised. Although, I have to admit that even though I never claimed this was anything but personal travel, I did happen to use my email address from my federal government aviation job.

Pretty soon Tabitha called--and this was a real Tabitha. Not someone who picked Tabitha because it sounded American--and she told me that everything was fixed and they are sending me a check right away. AND, not only are they refunding the bag I had to pay for twice, but also the bag that I decided to carry aboard instead of check.

God bless you, Tabitha! And you too, Mr. Lefebvre.

I had thought I was defeated. I had thought I'd failed, and then an email address fell from heaven and Tabitha spoke to me. It was awesome.

But I am still really irritated at three people somewhere in India.