Adrianne: The internet doesn’t have all the answers. But that doesn’t mean we can’t find them. This is Underunderstood.

Billy: I’m Billy Disney.

Adrianne: I’m Adrianne Jeffries.

Billy: I’m John Lagomarsino.

Regina: I’m Regina Dellea.

Billy: Today on the show: a spicy mystery.

John: So when was the last time one of you had your bags lost by an airline?

Regina: Maybe two years ago.

Adrianne: I think Christmas two years ago.

John: Bad year for bags.

Billy: I don’t think I’ve ever had my bags lost.

Adrianne: Really?

Billy: No. I never had to like come back to the airport or have them shipped to me or anything like that.

Regina: Oh, no, I had to have one ship to me and it was broken when it got to me.

John: Ooh.

Regina: Yeah, I was pissed. It was a new bag.

John: Did it get there on time? Like when they said it was gonna get there?

Regina: No.

John: Interesting. Well, this is a story about that. So I work with someone named Ana Olson. Over the holidays she was at home in New Mexico and she had a harrowing experience getting getting her own bags back on her way back to New York. And this was over New Year’s Eve. So let me just — I talked to her about the story, and I’ll let her tell most of it.

John: Hi Ana.

Ana Olson: Hi John.

John: Bring me bring me to the beginning of the situation.

Ana: Okay. Well the beginning is that I’m from New Mexico. I was going home for the holidays. Stocked up, got a ton of new Mexican foods to bring back with me.

John: Like what kinds of new new Mexican food?

Ana: Well mainly chile, a lot of chile. I had both red dried and green fresh frozen, like fresh and roasted.

John: Alright, so just to be perfectly clear here, we’re going to be talking a lot about chile. What we mean by that is not beef and beans. We mean chile peppers. So what Ana had in her bag was three and a half pounds of green roasted chili peppers. She also had some red dried peppers as well, and a bunch of other stuff too. She had a pound of coffee beans, also a pound of prosciutto, a bunch of marzipan and a couple loaves of bread from a from a local bakery that she’s into.

Adrianne: Goodness.

Regina: I really respect her. This is how you travel.

John: Yeah. This is all in a suitcase is dedicated to her favorite foods from home.

Ana: So anyway, I had this bag crammed full of stuff. It’s New Years Eve because the flights are cheaper I get to the airport and immediately as I’m checking in everyone at Southwest is like, hey, just so you know, good chance that your bags aren’t going to make it tonight. So if you wouldn’t mind just like taking out any essential medication. We just can’t be sure.

John: Wait wait, wait what situation could possibly tip them off that your bags might not go with you?

Ana: It was because their conveyor belt had broken at the airport.

Billy: Long story short, Southwest had a hunch that Ana’s bags would get lost in the course of getting back to New York and basically told her to mentally prepare for that reality and didn’t give her any recourse.

Ana: And of course, it’s important to note, I have three and a half pounds of frozen green chile in my bag. So you think I would have taken this more seriously, but I was like, no, I’m sure it’ll make it. I’m sure plus the plane is cold.

Billy: In, like, containers?

Ana: No, in a plastic bag that I just double bagged because I just thought you know, the belly of the plane, the cargo.

John: It’s called the belly.

Ana: That’s right, the belly of the plane is cold. Outside is cold. It’s winter. I’m sure it will be cold the whole way through. Really, really didn’t plan well.

John: Sure. So she gets on the plane. She goes through a layover in Dallas. She arrives back at LaGuardia. She makes her way to the baggage claim.

Ana: So I wait for my bags, and I wait for my bags, and I wait for my bags. And I just think oh, they’re not going to make it. So I go report my bags. I don’t know if have you ever had a lost bag?

Billy: I remember as a kid it happened a couple times, but I can’t remember the last time an airline lost a personal bag of mine, like really lost one.

Ana: Yeah. Well, so they make you tell they ask you to say three distinctive items from each bag. So, of course, you know, my three distinct items were like three and a half pounds of green chile, two pounds of coffee beans, a pound of prosciutto.

Billy: Formerly frozen.

Ana: Yeah, people must have thought I was crazy, because all along the way I would always ask, by the way, is the baggage area cold? Just how cold?

So by the way, it’s New Years Eve, right? I’m trying to go home to get to a party. That didn’t work out.

John: This is before midnight?

Ana: This is before midnight, but we’re like really cutting it close. My first Lyft cancels on me. I get in the car with Melvin, my Lyft driver, we celebrate New Years Eve together by calling his mom at midnight. His mom was asleep. Anyway, I get home and basically like nobody has been able to give me a straight answer about when the bags will appear, but they’re like, sometime tomorrow. They were like, they’ll probably arrive at 5 p.m., and then you’ll receive a call about who will drop them off and that was sort of it. I was like, okay, but who will call? And they said, the delivery service will call.

I’m given a link where I can track my bag and it takes me to wheresmysuitcase.com.

John: Okay, we’re going to pause here. Everyone go to wheresmysuitcase.com.

Regina: Oh, wow. So this is like a legitimate thing.

John: Is that how it looks to you? Really?

Regina: Yeah, I mean they have partnerships with major airlines. I mean obviously it’s a Wix template but there are participating airlines. It’s not like, just Frontier.

John: Yeah so there’s 17 participating airlines on this thing. So she had gotten a personal link to be able to track where her bag is. Once it arrives at LaGuardia and presumably when it gets delivered to her.

Regina: Wow, there’s no way her chile makes it.

John: Okay. Well, let’s keep going.

Ana: By the way. I’m looking at the email. I received it on January 1st at 1:10 p.m. Very cheerful. All right, so. “Dear Ana B. Olson. Welcome to Where’s My Suitcase! Recently your baggage was delayed while flying into LaGuardia Airport. You’re receiving this email because we will be handling your delivery on behalf of Southwest Airlines. We’ve entered your delivery order into our system and are working directly with the airline to get your baggage back to you as fast as possible at the address below. You’ll receive a notification once a driver has been assigned.”

John: And that’s what Ana had clicked and how she knew that she was supposed to get her bag by 5 p.m. on January first. So as you would expect, 5 p.m. comes and goes, and now it’s getting late.

Ana: 9:00 p.m. rolls around and I call Southwest and they’re like, oh great news. Your bag was delivered to LaGuardia at 5 p.m. Like it arrived and someone will be delivering it. It should arrive sometime before 11 p.m., is what they said.

John: That same day. The first.

Ana: Same day, the first.

John: Okay.

Ana: Or actually it was 10:00 p.m. And the reason I know is because 10:00 p.m. is when my search history starts to get crazy. Because obviously I haven’t heard anything. I don’t know where the bag is.

Billy: So she just wants to know the full story behind like who exactly has got her bags how this whole system works, what wheresmysuitcase.com is.

Ana: You want to feel like you can do something in this moment to move the universe forward. So I start doing some research. I do a deep Twitter dive initially and search for the hashtag #wheresmysuitcase and see horror stories, of course, of people tweeting from months ago being like, it’s been weeks. Where’s my suitcase? And that immediately starts make me nervous. And then I’m looking on the about page on wheresmysuitcase.com and I see the mention of a company called Home Serv, which by the way is not mentioned anywhere else on the web site.

John: I’m looking at it here. It’s also Home Serv with no ending e. S-E-R-V. Home Serve.

Ana: Important, distinctive. So I see that, I’m like Home Serv. Okay, we’re going to look into this. So then I Google Home Serv. Of course, not helpful at all. Then I think I look up Home Serv delivery, if I remember correctly. And I think that brought up something that was Home Serv Delivery LLC.

John: Also with the space right? Home-space-serv-space Delivery LLC.

Ana: Okay. So I look up Home Serve Delivery LLC and then I start looking that up in quotes and then I find a whole bunch of things.

John: She finds a site that lists businesses that are registered in Florida. And that site is called Florida database.

Ana: You know, some Florida business bureau something comes up. So that’s when I figure out that they’re in Orlando. So I scroll down, and the key thing here, is I find an address. The address listed on Florida database, which could be wrong, is 6751 Forum Drive, Suite 200. So from that I search for that address because I figure there has to be a physical building. There must be a phone number attached. Great.

John: So this is interesting, because

Regina: It’s SeaWorld?

John: What?

Regina: 6751 Forum Drive, Suite 200 and it says location: SeaWorld and International Drive, South area.

Billy: Are you saying they’re just throwing our bags into the tanks with the killer whales at SeaWorld?

Adrianne: This is bizarre. Did she find this name and phone number?

Billy: Yeah. So the interesting thing to me is that when she Googled this address it actually spit back a slightly different address.

Ana: And I get to, 6751 Forum Drive, Suite 230. But the building is the same and so I see International Drive, which immediately makes me think it’s an airport. Also, it’s Baggage Airline Guest Services, is the name of the business located in that same building, but just in a different suite. So then I search for this address and that’s when I got to Bags Inc. And Bags Inc is a very different kind of website. It’s like. It’s glossy. It’s chic. It’s “we hand deliver your bags to whatever destination.” It’s like a bag courier service.

Adrianne: Wait, I’m seeing bags VIP. Is that the same thing?

Regina: Me too. I think it’s the same thing.

Billy: I’m on bagsinc.com. Is that the one?

Regina: I’m on maketraveleasier.com slash bags VIP.

Adrianne: Same. Cascading company names. Cascading URLs. This is extremely spammy.

John: Yeah, so Bags Inc. seems to be a large piece of this missing bag industry. And if you go to the about page on Bags Inc., there are actual names of actual people. When you go into the management team tab of this.

Yeah, it’s it’s much more transparent. Like they have Vimeo embeds that have like corporate videos with seemingly real people in them.

Bags Inc. video: Is there a way to create the greatest travel experience a redefined level of service that ensures the traveler gets from point A to point B with a smile on their face, thinking about the experience that lies ahead? At Bags, we think so, which is why we’ve put the traveler’s smile at the core of everything we do for over 20 years.

John: All right, let’s get back to Ana’s story. Basically at this point Ana is convinced that there’s this like global multi-corporation conspiracy to withhold her bags, and it’s late at night and she checks wheresmysuitcase.com one more time. There is obviously no movement on the bags on the website. She calls it quits, goes to bed. The next day is January 2nd, and she is back to work.

Ana: So then I’m trying to get ahold of someone. I send an angry email to that customer service number again, and then I get a call at like 2 p.m. from a man named Mike, who goes, “yeah, we’ve been trying to get in touch with you.” And I said, no you haven’t. I know for a fact that you have not. And he goes, okay, okay. So what time are you going to be home tonight? Can you be home by 8? And I said sure, great. And then I finish by saying, and I’m so sorry, I know it’s weird question, but just to ask is your storage facility cold? And he goes, “is it cold?” I said, yeah, because I have a lot of frozen chile in my bag. And he goes, it’s not like refrigerator cold, but it’s cold.

I get home at 8:02. No, it was 8:04. But I marked the time. I was not about to be played by Mike and F-14 baggage, which I learned was the name of that company.

John: Wait. Whoa. Whoa.

Ana: So okay. Yeah. I know.

John: F-14 baggage, it turns out, is the name of the company that is delivering her bag. She knows this because she called them back, basically she had missed a call from Mike earlier in the day. She called them back and they told her that this was F-14 baggage. Yet another company name that she had never heard before who apparently had possession of her bag.

Regina: And all of the chile inside of it.

John: And all of the chile inside of it.

Ana: So 8:04, I give him a call. Can’t get through. Their office states that their business hours are 8 a.m. to midnight. So I call seven more times and can’t get through, and I wait all night.

John: So for the second day in a row, Ana goes to sleep. Still with no bags full of chili. Day 3 begins. We’re at January 3rd now.

Ana: And then at 7:50, I got a call.

John: A.m.?

Ana: 7:50 a.m. That said, are you home? Can we drop off your bags? Ultimately I did get my bags from a very nice man. I don’t know his name. He showed up on my doorstep, placed the bags down, smiled got my signature, left. Like there was very little engagement. And I immediately rushed to put my chile in the freezer. I ultimately I got my bags and the whole thing was very anticlimactic, and the customer service woman who I had emailed angrily from Where’s My Suitcase had sent me an email back being like, “Oh, I just heard that somebody’s been in touch with you, so it seems resolved” but I think what was just felt so weird about it is it was like… who is, and I don’t know why that would have made me felt better, but who is this company?

John: So at this point we have to her knowledge, Southwest Airlines, Where’s My Suitcase, Bags Inc, Home Serv, and F-14 all involved in the delivery of her missing bags.

Adrianne: Why does this feel like a complex underworld?

John: I have no idea and at the end of it, it’s just like, why did it take her three days to get these bags returned to her when even at the beginning of her trip, before she even left New Mexico, they told her that maybe her bags wouldn’t make it to New York.

Regina: Wait, did she eat the chile? Did we talk about this?

John: Yeah, I had the same question.

Did the chile survive?

Ana: It did.

John: Were you able to eat the chile?

Ana: So I think because it was in a closed environment, I convinced myself it was okay. I actually did cook it this weekend and a lot of people ate it and everybody’s fine.

Regina: Wait she served it to people?

Billy: Woah.

Adrianne: Did she disclose that the chile was not in her possession for 48 hours?

Billy: I was on board with her positivity until it led her to feed like presumably a whole party of people chile that had gone through that’s who knows what?

Regina: That’s just blind optimism.

John: She did make a pozole out of the chile, and she served it to her friends. I’m trying not to pass judgment here. I’m just trying to determine to the best of our abilities what steps the bag full of these chile peppers went through on its way back home. And if it’s really passed off from one company to another until they decide who can actually get it to you, what is the average temperature of these various facilities?

Adrianne: Yes!

Billy: Yes, I think we need to find every place that this bag ended up. We need to document its entire journey try to get as close of an estimate to what the actual temperature was in each place. I’m very concerned about Ana’s friends.

Coming up, we find out how chilly the chile was.

***

John: Okay, folks. I’ve got good news, and I’ve got bad news. I think more good news than bad news. So the good news is I’m pretty sure I know how Ana’s bags got to her. And I’m pretty sure I know the approximate temperature that the chile was the whole time.

Regina: I really hope it was safe.

Billy: This is the important part to me.

John: The bad news is that none of the people involved in the transaction of the bags… basically, none of them would tell me if I’m right about my hunches. Mmm. Let’s back up a little bit. I want to talk to a neutral third party about all of this before I started digging.

Adrianne: Smart.

John: Yeah, thank you. So I called up Scott McCartney.

Scott McCartney: I’ve been covering the airline industry for 25 years at the Wall Street Journal.

John: Scott writes the Middle Seat column at the Journal. He told me how airlines handle baggage when it’s lost, and basically each one of the airlines has its own kind of system for tagging and tracking. Bad news for Ana, of the eight major airlines that Scott evaluated in his 2018 roundup of the best and worst airlines, Southwest had the second to worst record for mishandled baggage.

Scott: Southwest does historically very little tracking. Simple paper tags. They don’t yet scan barcodes as they’re loaded onto planes, as a lot of airlines do. You know they will eventually get there, but it’s a particular problem at Southwest because bags fly free at Southwest and there aren’t baggage fees. And and so people check a lot of bags at Southwest.

John: So luck was already not on Ana’s side with this one. Now if you remember, Ana’s bag got to LaGuardia around 5 p.m. on January 1st. That means it was hanging out in New Mexico overnight because she got to New York around midnight the night before. So if we want to know if Ana’s bags were cold the whole time, part of that is knowing what the conditions are like where airlines process bags. I asked Scott about this.

I assume the bags were not cold during this whole process over three days?

Scott: It probably depends on whether it was winter or not. The bags may well be outdoors.

John: It was on January 1st. Yeah.

Scott: Yeah, so so perfectly chilled. No, it just depends. In general most of the baggage sorting operations I’ve been in, they’re underneath the passenger terminal, you know, the doors, the garage doors, are all open. It’s not heated. It’s not air conditioned in the in the summer. It’s kind of fascinating to think when you’re standing in a terminal you don’t really realize what’s going on underneath your feet, and it’s miles and miles of conveyor belts and giant long sledgehammers that that sort of, if a bag is going to be knocked down a chute, it gets hit with one of these pushers.It gets whacked. It gets sent down a chute. It’s not a delicate system.

John: I looked up the weather in Albuquerque on January 1st, 2019. It was a high of 35 degrees Fahrenheit and a low of just 15 degrees Fahrenheit. So, okay, I have hope if the bags were actually stored outdoors under the terminal while they were waiting for their eventual flight, the chile definitely could have been frozen. So the bags get on a flight to New York City and they arrive by 5 p.m. on January 1st.

Adrianne: What’s the temperature in the cargo hold?

John: Of the plane?

Adrianne: Yeah.

John: I looked this up too. The cargo hold of a plane is typically cold but above freezing. So it seemed like the average is somewhere around 44, 45 degrees Fahrenheit. Okay. So the bags get on a flight to New York City and they arrive by 5 p.m. on January 1st, but Ana didn’t speak to a Southwest representative until 9:00 p.m. that night. And that rep indicated that the bag was still at the airport at LaGuardia. So for those four hours, the bag was being held at the airport in New York waiting to be picked up by someone.

Adrianne: This sounds like trouble.

John: Right? So I reached out to Southwest and they declined a phone interview, but they did offer to answer some questions by email. So I asked them, quote, “Ana had some perishables in her bag, which she actually ate once the bag was returned three days after her flight. This all happened in January. Would that bag have been kept cold through this process?” And they responded to me, quote, “Checked baggage is kept controlled and out of the elements, but we do not refrigerate baggage while in storage or in transit.”

Adrianne: Make sense.

Billy: Yeah, I don’t know if it was anyone’s expectations that their lost baggage was being kept in a giant refrigerator like at a liquor store or something, right.

John: You would expect then that if it were kept indoors, it’s not cold. If it were kept outdoors, though, what’s the deal. So in New York City on the first,here’s some bad news, it actually got up to 58 degrees Fahrenheit. So even if the bags were kept outside for those four hours, they were they were approaching room temperature and well above freezing. Let’s take a moment now. We’re at the point of the journey when Where’s My Suitcase gets involved. Let’s look at Where’s My Suitcase. Like Ana found, if you go to the about page on wheresmysuitcase.com, you find this Home Serv LLC. Home Serv without the e. And if you Google around for information about Home Serv, you find Bags Inc. And when you Google that, you find Baggage Airline Guest Services, and when you Google that, you find some news from last year. So on October 27th 2018, this press release came out titled, “SP plus Corporation agrees to acquire bags.”

Regina: We acquired some bags.

John: Yeah, exactly.

Billy: SP Plus, the parking garage company?

Adrianne: Yeah. I’ve parked in an SP plus parking garage before

John: It’s really weird that the two out of the four of us were familiar with SP Plus Corporation because I was not before any of this.

Adrianne: Seems like a big company.

Billy: Yeah, if you if you’re like in a city and you’re trying to search for parking, it’s like the default thing that will come up.

John: I did not know that.

Regina: Me neither.

John: But let me read you the first paragraph of the press release around this acquisition. “SP Plus Corporation, a leading national provider of parking ground transportation and related services to commercial institutional and municipal clients throughout North America, today announced that it has entered into a definitive purchase agreement to acquire Baggage Airline Guest Services Inc, and Home Serv Delivery LLC, their subsidiaries and affiliates, parentheses, collectively Bags, for an all-cash purchase price of $275 million.”

Regina: Wow.

John: “Bags is a leading provider of baggage delivery, remote airline check-in, and other related services, primarily to airline, airport, and hospitality clients.” So we’ve learned a lot in these two very long sentences. First, Baggage Airline Guest Services Inc, Home Serv Delivery LLC, and Bags, they’re all the same entity. And since we know that Where’s My Suitcase is part of Home Serv Delivery, that means that all this stuff is in one company, right?

Adrianne: So it’s Where’s My Suitcase is inside Home Serv is inside Bags is inside SP Plus Parking Services.

John: Yes. Exactly.

Regina: It’s like a giant Russian doll.

John: Yes. But here’s where things get a little frustrating. I tried to interview someone from Bags to ask exactly what the relationship is between all of these sub companies, because it seems like they have a lot of overlapping services and personnel. I called up and I told them who I was, that I wanted to talk to someone for this podcast. A little while later, I got a missed call from someone named Mark who was calling me back. So I called Bags again. The receptionist told me that she would transfer me to Mark.

Receptionist: Thank you for calling Baggage Airlines Guest services. This is Amber speaking. How can I help you?

John: Hi I’m returning a call from Mark.

Receptionist: One moment.

John: Thanks.

It went straight to an automated voice messaging system.

Voice mail recording: Your call has been answered by Via IP Office. To leave a message, wait for the tone.

John: I tried back the next day.

Receptionist: Thanks for calling Baggage Guest Airline Services, how can I make your travel easier?

John: And another receptionist told me that Mark was in his office.

Receptionist: It’s going to be Mark. He should be in his office. Let me transfer you. Okay?

John: Okay. Thanks so much.

Went to voicemail again.

Regina: Wow.

Voice mail recording: Your call has been answered by a Via IP Office.

Billy: Did you try going to wheresmymark.com?

Adrianne: You think he listened to the testicular heating episode?

John: I called Mark like a dozen times at various times of day Marco and of day and Mark won’t call me back. I don’t think Mark has anything to hide per se, but it blows my mind that he won’t call me back and tell me what exactly Bags does. So anyway, I have to just go on what I know. Right? From what I can gather, Bags offers all kinds of services to airlines and airports, and it seems like Home Serv Delivery is the arm of Bags that’s responsible for lost baggage logistics specifically.

Adrianne: Got it.

John: So I asked Southwest. “Ana was directed by Southwest to check wheresmysuitcase.com for updates on the process. What’s the business and tech relationship like with that site? Does Southwest provide information to Where’s My Suitcase?” And the response was, “In the majority of our markets we employ Home Serv delivery to manage same day delivery of bags. The website above is the portal via which scanned bag information is uploaded so customers may track their bag’s delivery status.”

Adrianne: So they didn’t actually answer the question.

John: They confirmed what we expected here, right? Home Serv Delivery is the direct point of contact with Southwest. That’s who they contracted. And Where’s My Suitcase is just like a tech portal to seeing what’s going on with Home Serv.

Adrianne: Right. Also, same day delivery?

John: Yeah.

Adrianne: Try searching wheresmysuitcase.com on Twitter and you’ll see a lot of people talking about not same day delivery.

Billy: That’s the weird thing with these domains. I feel like they’re setting themselves up for, they’re setting their customers up for disappointment with all of them. Like, wheresmybag.com? They’re lost. Maketraveleasier.com? Like, make travel easier you go to when you’re having the worst travel experience and no one’s really giving you the answers you want.

John: I kind of get why you would want to obscure your company name through several layers of other interfaces and other companies, right? Because the only people who would actually be reaching out to contact you are people who are angry about a process that’s not working for them.

Billy: Yeah, right.

Adrianne: But Home Serv wasn’t the company that eventually delivered Ana her bag. There was another company.

John: You’re right. It was another company. Remember the name of that company?

Adrianne: It was F-14 Delivery Services?

John: Yeah close. F-14 baggage. So. Presumably F-14 was contracted by Bags. And because I couldn’t talk to Bags, I couldn’t ask them what their relationship was with F-14. So on a whim I asked Southwest, not really expecting that they’d know. So they wrote back, “Home Serv Delivery manages the local vendors that execute the local same day deliveries. In this instance, this company was the local delivery company.” It seems like Home Serv, Bags, whatever, manages the dispatching and it contracts local delivery companies to actually physically pick up the bags and deliver them to the people whose bags they are. So naturally I wanted to talk to F-14 themselves. Ana gave me a sticky note with the phone number that she’d been told to call by F-14 themselves. So I called that number. The first time I called, a man answered. It was unintelligible what he said, but I said, hey is this F-14, and immediately he hung up on me. It was startling. So anyway a few days later I called back the same number, but this time an answering message actually identified the business as F-14 Baggage.

Voice mail recording: Hi, you’ve reached F-14 Baggage. Our office hours are 8 a.m. till midnight. Please leave a message.

John: And I asked them to call me back haven’t received a call back. I called back again left another message. They haven’t called me back. Very frustrating, very suspicious. But in the meantime. I asked Adrianne for a little bit of help because she’s generally just better at being a reporter on these kinds of things. So she found someone at a company called Z Orange and Z Orange seems to be kind of similar to F-14. Adrianne, do you want to talk a little bit about what that is?

Adrianne: Yeah, so I was curious about the people who are actually bringing the bag to your home and how they experience this whole process, which I assume is just a horrible in the worst job in everyone’s mad at you all the time. And so I found a job listing from this company Z Orange. And they were advertising for a lost bags delivery driver. “Independent contractor delivery drivers needed. We deliver all over New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut driving delayed luggage car minivans. You would be an independent contractor. You can deliver as many or as few pickups as You Wish throughout the day. You will be using your own vehicle, setting your own schedule, and be compensated per delivery.”

Billy: Okay, so the so this sounds sort of like…

Regina: Like Uber for returning bags.

Adrianne: Uber. Postmates. Door Dash.

Billy: Yeah, or like the sort of last mile independent Amazon delivery people, right?

Adrianne: Exactly. And that kind of made me realize that this is like how all logistics, shipping logistics kind of works, is that it starts out super centralized and then spreads out over a bunch of people handing off the thing, and gets more and more federated as you go down the chain until it’s just a dude in their car.

Billy: Right.

Adrianne: So I called Z Orange Systems and just talked to the person who picked up who just just seemed like sort of a person who picks up the phone and not anybody in a position to comment. He said he would ask his boss if he could do an interview, but then never got back to me, which is not really surprising. But his explanation was the airline contracts with Bags Inc. Which is now SP Plus. Bags slash SP Plus contracts with Z Orange, which does, he told me, quote, “driver procurement.” That means Z Orange is hiring drivers and working with companies that provide drivers. So I think Z Orange is analogous to F-14. F-14 also seems to be a taxi service, so it makes sense that they would be picking up some of these deliveries and just throwing them in the back of the taxi.

John: So that the hierarchy from top to bottom is SP Plus, Bags, Home Serv, Where’s My Suitcase is kind of like off to the side as an appendage, then under Home Serve is many companies, but you would expect F-14 to be one of them. Then the actual driver, who may, I guess it’s possible, belong to another group of drivers, or is an individual operating as an individual. So it seems like we’ve got a handle on the hierarchy. So at this point I wanted to tell Ana what we had found.

Ana: The journey my bag went on.

John: I told her all about Home Serv and Bags and F-14 and how there are all kinds of middlemen involved.

Where’s My Suitcase and Home Serv Delivery are the same company.

She had what I think was a pretty reasonable reaction.

Ana: So can I tell you what it honestly is surprising about this to me.

John: Yeah.

Ana: It’s not surprising to me that the delivery of bags is handled locally. That makes so much sense to me. What is confusing to me is the fact that there is like one large corporation that has hands on so many bags essentially across airlines. That’s weird to me.

John: Bags is really large and it has deals with every major airline in the states. So this is really a story about competition.

Ana: Like even the word monopoly, you know, I have a visceral reaction to it just at a gut level of like, oh God, like that’s not a good thing but it is just especially weird me that there is actually one big bag octopus, in a way. That’s so weird.

John: It seems like there just isn’t enough competition to provide an impetus for Bags to make the process more efficient. And because there are so many layers of subcontracting it’s really easy for each arm of this octopus to pass off responsibility to another tentacle.

Ana: Where’s Teddy Roosevelt when you need him to come bust the bag trust? Like it really feels strange to me that there’s no impetus for for good service at all.

John: But but let’s remember the question that we have to answer. What about the chile, was it safe to eat? So let’s examine the evidence. When Ana asked F-14 if their facility was cold, they told her it was, quote, “cold, but not refrigerator cold.” I would imagine Ana’s bags spent some time in a vehicle of some sort, a car or truck. And that was I mean, it would be very weird to me if that vehicle was refrigerated.

Adrianne: I think it’s also possible that there is no F-14 facility.

John: Yes.

Adrianne: That F-14 is just connecting the driver with a request from the airport and the driver goes and picks it up, which means that Ana’s bag was in the back of Mike’s car for the two days.

John: Very possible. We can’t confirm that though.

Adrianne: This is wild speculation.

John: There’s little doubt in my mind that these chiles were unfrozen for you know, quite a while.

Regina: I mean, it’s confirmed that they were unfrozen when they got to her. So you just don’t know how long they were unfrozen before.

John: Exactly. I think it’s probably on the order of a day or two, is when they were thawed.

Regina: Hmm.

John: But what does this mean, right? To find out, I called these guys.

Don Schaffner: So my name is Don Schaffner. I’m a distinguished professor and extension specialist at Rutgers University. And I do a podcast called Food Safety Talk with my friend Ben Chapman.

Ben Chapman: And I’m Ben Chapman. I’m a professor at NC State University. And I also do the same podcast, Food Safety Talk.

John: Don and Ben told me that the risks associated with these chiles actually began the moment that they were roasted.

Don: But once you process them in any way, and that could mean roasting, that could mean chopping, okay? Once you do that, what you’re actually doing is you’re breaking open the cells, the plant cells of the chile, and now the water that’s in those cells, the nutrients, the sugars that are in those cells, are sitting there available for any microorganisms that might be on the surface of the chile to to start to grow.

John: So say some microorganisms wound up growing on those roasted chiles, right? That’s where the risk starts. And now I think we all assumed that freezing the chiles would do something to mitigate that risk. And that’s only sort of correct. It turns out we would be okay if the food was cold, even if it’s not freezing.

Ben: And for us, we really look at like 41 as a number that we’re controlling most of the microbes that are going to grow that lead to the foodborne illness, but when we get to 45 and 50 that growth is just it’s going to be become exponential at that point.

John: It’s not looking good for these chiles.

Ben: Yeah, and my guess here is, I’d be looking for some spore-former, like bacillus cereus, that survived that roasting process and now is sitting, you know, let’s say 12 hours at 65 degrees or 70 degrees with a whole bunch of water.

John: And that possibility to me seems pretty likely. The chiles could have been sitting around indoors at LaGuardia or F-14 or a vehicle in a garage for a whole day.

Don: The risk is not zero that they would be contaminated. And then if they were contaminated with bacillus and you went through this temperature exposure cycle, there’s a possibility that in fact bacillus cereus could grow and it would make toxin and one of the things about bacillus cereus toxin, which kind of maybe gets to the next question, is that it’s a heat stable toxin. And so even if your friend were to recook the chiles, boil them or microwave them until they were steaming hot, that toxin might still be there.

Regina: Oh, no.

Ben: If we’re treating her posole like it was a commercial facility, then what she did would have violated the rules that we would expect in the food code, regardless of state that she made it, in a restaurant. But there’s a lot of things that people do in their own homes that aren’t congruent with what we’d expect from a commercial facility.

John: This is true and Ana continues to defend serving the pozole to her guests.

Ana: I’m sad to learn that everyone disapproves of my choice to carry my chile in my bag. But that’s okay. Everyone survived eating it and it was delicious.

John: No one got sick?

Ana: No one got sick. In fact, everybody loves it and they’ve asked me to make it again. I’m serious.

Billy: They could have all died. This could have been like a Heaven’s Gate situation.

Don: Okay, if Ben and I were in her shoes, what would we have done? And I can tell you that I would have thrown it away and apologized to my friends, and next time I would have taken the chiles in my carry-on.

John: So there it is. No one got sick. So they were probably no toxins in this particular batch of roasted chilies. Right?

Regina: Right.

John: But we know that between sitting on a tarmac in New Mexico, flying in the cargo hold of a jet, waiting at LaGuardia Airport, and getting picked up and delivered by F-14, the chiles had plenty of time to thaw and fluctuating enough to promote the growth of bacteria or spores that could have made the chile unsafe to eat, but even knowing all of that Ana, isn’t intimidated.

Ana: I still technically have those roasted chiles. They’re in the freezer. And they’ve been fine. I’ve put them in lots of things. They’ve been A-okay. But I will get new chile, yes, to do it again for my birthday.

John: Will you carry the bags on this time?

Ana: Probably.

John: I relayed this to Ben and Don.

She said she still has the chiles in her freezer and she is still making food with them.

Don: If she invited me over, I would politely decline.

***

Adrianne: Underunderstood is produced by Billy Disney, Regina Dellea, John Lagomarsino, and me, Adrianne Jeffries.

John: Special thanks this week to Ana Olson for bringing this story to us, and also for being a really good sport while we roasted her for almost killing her friends. Also, thank you to Phil Robibero, who made some amazing custom artwork for this episode. you might be able to see it in your podcast app. If you can’t, head on over to underunderstood.com and check it out. It’s really great.

Billy: If you’d like to see more from us, we’re on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, we have a Plurk, a FriendFeed, a DailyBooth, a Vine, a Yik Yak. we also just set up a Google Wave. And you can find out which three of those are actually true by going to our website, underunderstood.com.

Adrianne: We have a special request. Have you ever been mad at your spouse, or anyone, for something that happened in a dream? Has anyone ever been mad at you because of something you did in their dream? Tell us about it. You can leave us a voice message via the link in the show notes, or record a voice memo on your phone and email it to hello@underunderstood.com

Billy: Thanks for listening. We’ll be back next week.