The Complaint

Lucia Romero had flown to Edinburgh with everything she needed for a week-long teachers' conference: two blouses she had ironed with almost religious care, a folder of handouts, and a jar of her mother's quince jam intended as a gift for her host. Her suitcase, as it turned out, had other plans. While Lucia stood at an empty carousel in Scotland, it was apparently enjoying the northern lights in Reykjavik.

The woman at the baggage desk was sympathetic but powerless. She handed Lucia a reference number, a toothbrush in a plastic pouch and a leaflet explaining that most delayed bags "are reunited with their owners within forty-eight hours." Lucia, who taught English for a living, noticed the passive voice and found it deeply unhelpful. Nobody, it seemed, was responsible for anything.

That night, in a borrowed T-shirt, she opened her laptop and wrote the complaint. She did it properly, the way she taught her students to: a clear subject line, the booking reference in the first paragraph, the facts in chronological order and, at the end, a polite but unmistakable request. "I would be grateful if you could confirm the current location of my suitcase and advise me on how to claim the cost of essential items purchased in the meantime," she wrote. She resisted the temptation to mention that she had been a loyal customer for eleven years. Then she mentioned it anyway.

The reply arrived two days later, along with the suitcase. It was signed by someone called Magnus, from customer relations, and it began in the usual way: "Dear Ms. Romero, thank you for taking the time to contact us." The second paragraph, however, was different. "I must confess," Magnus wrote, "that I have rarely read a complaint so well organized. Your suitcase did not deserve its holiday. I hope you will accept a full refund of your expenses and our sincere apologies. Off the record, I hope the jam survived."

Lucia laughed out loud in the hotel breakfast room. The jam had survived, though the handouts had not; a bottle of shampoo had leaked all over them somewhere above the Atlantic. She wrote back to say so, and to thank him for a reply that sounded as if an actual human being had written it. She half expected silence. Instead, a week later, a second email appeared in her inbox.

Magnus explained that he worked from the airline's office in Reykjavik, which was perhaps why her suitcase had felt so at home there. He admitted that he spent most of his days writing the same five sentences to people who were, quite understandably, furious. "Your email made me want to write a sixth," he said. He also asked, a little shyly, whether "quince" was really the English word for the fruit, because his dictionary disagreed with his grandmother.

So began a correspondence that neither of them had planned. Lucia corrected his prepositions; he corrected her Icelandic, which consisted of exactly three words. They argued about whether "Kind regards" was warmer than "Best wishes" and agreed that "Yours faithfully" belonged in a museum. Her students, when she told them, were delighted. For the rest of the term, every formal email they wrote in class was addressed to Magnus.

The following summer, Lucia booked another flight to Edinburgh. This time she packed a second jar of jam in her hand luggage, carefully wrapped, with a label in her neatest handwriting: "For customer relations. Please do not send to Iceland unless accompanied by its owner."