After five and half wonderful weeks in Italy, it was time to go home. It should have been simple. OAT had made my flight arrangements. I had a reservation to fly back from Florence to Washington Dulles Airport with a connection at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. As it turned out, it was anything but.
A couple of days before my scheduled departure date, I realized that something very strange was going on with my reservation. I received an email from Air France confirming that I’d cancelled my flight to Washington. Well, I certainly hadn't done that. When I couldn't get through to Air France on the phone, I called OAT (it was midnight in Boston) and they were able to get me back on the flight. That seemed to solve the problem, or so I thought.
But about 24 hours before my departure, when I tried to check in on the Air France app, I faced another problem. According to the app, I’d already checked in for the flight. And the name of the passenger on my reservation wasn’t me! It was a person with the same last name but a different first name. I already knew I couldn’t get in touch with Air France over the phone so my only hope was to straighten out this confusion at the airport in Florence.
The flight from Florence was scheduled to leave at 10am. I got to the airport at 6:30am and waited in line about 45 minutes before a couple of Air France agents showed up. When it was my turn, I handed over my passport with a smile and as much confidence as I could muster. The agent smiled back, but several seconds later, she looked up at me in confusion. Didn't you fly to Nairobi? she asked. I tried my best to explain that Air France had made an error, somehow putting another passenger’s information into my reservation.
Of course, she had to start making phone calls to supervisors to find out what to do. After half an hour or so, they came up with a partial solution. They would check my luggage all the way through to Washington Dulles. However, they would only give me a boarding pass for the flight to Paris. Once I got to Charles de Gaulle airport, I’d have to go to the Air France ticket counter, explain the situation all over again and hope they would give me a boarding pass for the flight to Washington.
Well, that was better than nothing. Once I landed in Paris, I rushed off the plane and followed the signs for passengers with connecting flights. The flight from Paris to Washington was supposed to leave in a little less than two hours. Right away, I ran into a problem. In order to access the transit area, I had to scan the boarding pass for my connecting flight, which is exactly what I didn’t have. Thank goodness there was an airport official at the turnstile who believed my garbled explanation and let me pass through.
I checked the departures board for the gate for the flight to Washington and ran in that direction. Along the way, I wasn’t surprised to encounter multiple turnstiles where I was required to scan my nonexistent boarding pass again. Somehow, I talked my way through each one, and finally reached the gate.
Almost completely out of breath, I presented myself to the Air France agent and gasped out what I hoped was a coherent explanation of my situation. Perhaps I looked and sounded so pathetic that she took pity on me. In any case, she gave me a boarding pass for the flight. Clutching it tightly, I collapsed into a chair in the waiting area until it was time to board. Finally, I could relax.
The flight itself was uneventful. I was looking forward to getting home in the evening and sleeping in my own bed. Since I had Global Entry, I was pretty certain that the only possible delay might be waiting for my luggage. Sure enough, it took only a few seconds for the Global Entry machine to recognize me. Happy that my journey home was almost over, I then walked up to the Passport Control officer in the glass booth and handed over my passport.
- Where have been? he asked.
- Italy, I said with a weary smile.
- Grimly, he asked, Where else?
- Just Italy, I replied, somewhat shocked at the question.
Looking at me suspiciously, he asked, Where have you been in Africa?
Oh, no. I realized what was happening. This was about the Ebola outbreak. Passengers coming from Africa were subject to special screening. Some weren’t being allowed to enter the country. Some had to be quarantined. And the person whose information was mixed up with mine had flown to or from Nairobi.
- Wait here, he commanded.
A few minutes later, a tall figure completely enclosed in hazmat gear strode up to the booth and led me to a CDC (Center for Disease Control) interview area. Exhausted beyond belief, I explained for what seemed like the 1000th time that I hadn’t been to Africa. Thank goodness he understood that an Air France agent had made an error. At last, I was free to leave the airport and I could put all thoughts of the past 24 hours behind me.
But not quite.
Less than 48 hours after I set foot on U.S. soil, a text message from the U.S. Public Health Service appeared on my phone.
It said:
US Public Health: Welcome!
You are receiving this message because you recently arrived in the US from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) or Uganda, where there is an Ebola outbreak, or from South Sudan, a neighboring country which is geographically considered at risk for Ebola.
Please watch for these Ebola symptoms until 21 days AFTER you left DRC, Uganda, or South Sudan: fever, chills, headache, muscle aches, rash, chest pain, sore throat, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, or unexplained bleeding or bruising (late stage of illness).
Now the U.S. government believed I’d just arrived from Africa! Would this never end? Desperate to get my name out of whatever database they were using, I spent many hours over the next few days trying to get through to a human being at the U.S. Public Health Service, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the CDC. It was a complete waste of time, of course, and I eventually gave up.
A few weeks later, I received another text from the Public Health Service telling me that my 21 days of monitoring for signs of Ebola were over.
I even spent some time trying to track down the individual whose name appeared as the passenger on my reservation. (I’m not naming her here since it wasn’t her fault that this fiasco occurred.) After a little searching, I identified her profile on LinkedIn. She is an American who works in the field of public health and previously lived in Africa. She never responded to the message I sent her inquiring if she had run into any difficulty with Air France flights recently.
The last thing I did was to email Air France’s Data Protection Officer asking them to correct the erroneous information in their database. A few weeks after I sent the email, I received a reply that noted the high volume of requests they received and informed me that it would be a while before they could address my concerns. That was several weeks ago. I’m still waiting.
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