Gerchick identified the process by which a bag is checked and showed how a piece of luggage might get "mishandled" along the way. When you give your suitcase to a check-in agent, a bag tag is attached to it, bearing your flight number, a three-letter airport code, and a bar code. The bag then goes onto a conveyer belt heading to security screening. Your bag could get sent to the wrong place if the wrong destination number is used or if the tag is somehow ripped. Once in the screening area, TSA workers examine your bag and then move it to a station near your boarding gate. But if something TSA considers suspicious is spotted in your bag or a strap snags on something on the belt, your luggage may get delayed. Finally, once your bag reaches the area near the boarding gate, it gets loaded onto the plane. However, bags can either fall off the cart en route to the plane or simply arrive there too late.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
