How an AirPod’s seen more of the world than its owner

There are two kinds of travellers: those who pay for their seats, and those who are forgotten in them. To the second, and more fortunate, class one is proud to belong. One’s escape began, as the best ones do, in seat 6A of United Flight UA 926, between San Francisco and Frankfurt. The owner, a gentleman who helps readers find their longings rather than mislaying his own, disembarked without me. One, meanwhile, had slipped into the upholstery and resolved to see the world.

At the counter he was informed that, as the aircraft was operated under a codeshare, his sorrow belonged to another address. So, he filed his complaint online, and entered into correspondence with a department named GenBag; and here the comedy ripened into art.

Each morning the oracle called Find My told the truth: Brisbane, Coral Sea, Oakland, Queensland, an hour above the Pacific, and a descent upon Port Vila – a place the owner has never seen in 40 years of flying. He forwarded these bulletins faithfully; GenBag replied, with equal faith, that the location was not clear. It was perfectly clear. It was seat 6A. It is only the seat that travels.

They asked for the satellite view, then for a serial number, with instructions so long that the document explaining how to find the object grew longer than any attempt to find it. For the owner, the question was no longer the AirPod, but the process. Plus, he is jealous. There he sits, grounded in Mumbai, while his AirPod crosses the Pacific twice a week. 

And so the matter was closed – until, in a final flourish of goodwill, United dispatched the recovered traveller by FedEx to the owner’s son in Cupertino, who in turn couriered it across an ocean to Mumbai. The parcel arrived; the owner opened it with the trembling joy of a reunion – and found within an AirPod that was not his at all. Stranger still, the oracle called Find My went on insisting, with serene indifference, that his own AirPod remained exactly where it had chosen to be – above Houston, its battery still going strong.

There remains but one recourse left to a desperate man: to alert DHS that the AirPod travels on no valid visa, and ought, in national interest, to be deported back to India. One ought to lose oneself rather more often; it remains the only dependable way left of seeing the world.

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