Every once in a while you read something that makes you say out loud “What was that person thinking”? Indeed, after reading more and more of these articles, I stopped commenting on them. Passenger stupidity was no longer novel. However, on my recent flight to Amsterdam, I did experience a novel level of stupidity — new to me and the entire flight crew.

It was a United Airlines 767 flying out of Chicago. The plane was full, but not jammed. I was getting settled into business class — collecting a glass of champagne from the flight attendant, finding a place to stash my pillow and blanket — when I felt and heard a bang. We hadn’t left the gate yet, so I wasn’t too worried — perhaps someone was a bit rough in hooking up the tug or closing a luggage door. However, when I heard the captain key the mike, I was less confident.

The captain had felt the same bang. He called down to the ground crew and asked them what in the heck they were doing. Only then did they tell him that one of the baggage loaders had decided to take a shortcut with his luggage cart and drive under the plane. Unfortunately, he was a poor judge of height and didn’t quite make it — hence the bang. The luggage cart hit the fuselage of the 767 hard. The captain called out Maintenance who didn’t take long to figure out that the resulting ding in the aluminum skin wasn’t going to stand up to a North Atlantic crossing. We packed up our belongings and shuffled back into O’Hare.

All the flight attendants were shaking their heads. None of them had ever had anything like this happen to them before. A few started a pool on how long it would take to fire the handler. It wasn’t a complete disaster, though — for me, that is. United ended up “re-deploying” a 767 bound for São Paulo to our flight. And, walking up to our new gate, I heard my name being called. I’d been upgraded to 1st Class to compensate for the inconvenience. So, 3 hours later, I was settling into my larger seat, collecting a better glass of champagne from the flight attendant, and listening to the captain say over the PA system “I don’t know what that guy was thinking…”