Doggie Bag

Posted by: on Apr 24, 2012 | 4 Comments

As many of you know, I make no secret about things that bother me when it comes to air travel. Boarding procedures, carry on luggage, folks who probably should buy 2 seats, whatever craziness that comes with being on a commercial airplane.

Yesterday, Linda and I were traveling back home from a long weekend visiting my folks in the Jewish Virgin Islands, a.k.a. Palm Beach County. While we were in the boarding area waiting to get on the plane, a woman at the next counter was carrying on an animated conversation with the gate attendant. I couldn’t hear what she was saying from that distance but I could hear a little, yippie yappie dog making plenty of noise. If you were watching, it almost appeared that the woman’s voice was in sync with the dogs, which made me smile inside and gave me an idea for a blog post, just wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it. It didn’t take much longer before I had my answer.

After several minutes of chewing the gate attendant’s ear off, the woman was escorted from the gate by airport security. By the way, airport security was walking around with a labrador retriver, a real dog who was very well behaved.  Anyway…as she passed us, I saw that it was her little, yippie yappie dog that was actually making all that racket and that she was carrying the dog in some sort of shopping bag….a doggie bag. She (the woman, not the dog) was barking (yes, I know) at the security guard the whole time she walked next to him. It was from this one sided conversation that I was able to determine that the airline had informed her that she couldn’t carry her doggie in the bag on the plane. That she needed an approved airline kennel carrier that would fit under her seat as with any other piece of carry on luggage. From the tone of her voice, it sounded like this all had come to news to her.

Now, I have questions about this whole episode:
1. How the hell did this woman get through airport security without her dog in the proper container?
2.  Why would this woman think that she could carry her dog onto a plane in a shopping bag?
3. What happens when a dog needs to take care of business while flying? Now that I think about it, I’m not sure I really want the answer to that one.
4. Why is that it’s always the little dogs that make the most annoying little yaps, yips and yelps? I’m sure there were more than a few folks in the terminal that just wanted that yappie little bitch to shut up….I mean the dog….not the woman…well maybe both.