The Day I Left My Passport On A Plane...

Parents: look away.

Once upon a time, there was a foolish young adventurer whose only weakness was unhindered grumpiness when tired. Fatigue was her kryptonite because not only did it make her horribly cranky, it also made her forget about essential items like USB sticks, keys and piles of exercise books.

One night, after her flight from Tawau to Kota Kinabalu had been delayed by an hour because the whole of KK airport was closed, and she had valiantly spent all her strength getting her and some innocent villagers transferred onto an earlier flight, the foolish adventurer arrived at a hostel and was greeted, exhausted, by the receptionist.

It was the dead of night. The receptionist asked for her passport, as is custom. The foolish adventurer searched in her backpack.

The passport was not there.

"I have left my passport on the plane!" she whispered, in a silent, death murmur. "My working visa is in that passport."

Worst of all, that passport had a multitude of cool and awesome stamps from many foreign and exotic countries in it.  That passport was one of the only things that made the foolish adventurer Cool.

After some fatigue-infuriating faff, the foolish adventurer shouted, "I AM GOING BACK TO THE AIRPORT!" and jumped in a taxi where she sat in an intense state of anxiety and dread for a full fifteen minutes.

At the airport, she learnt the following things:
- Flight 6127 on which she had flown had returned to Tawau.
- Flight 6127 would return to Kota Kinabalu between 1:50-2:15am.
- The Passport of Security and Life may or may not be on the plane.

The foolish adventurer thanked the wise informers to whom she had spoken and sat down to wait, watching the clock tick slowly. In the next hour and a half, she learnt and realised the following things:
- Without her passport, she would not be returning to Saigon on Sunday afternoon.
- Her school was going to be really mad at her.
- To get out of Kota Kinabalu she would have to get a police report to get a temporary travel pass to get to Kuala Lumpar to go to the British Embassy (thus missing her transfer) to get a temporary international travel pass to get to Saigon the following day (after an extra night at a hotel in KL and completely new ticket to Saigon) to sit with Vietnamese Immigration officers and hope that they would let her back into the country to work illegally without a visa.
- The flight she had booked to go home at Christmas would be null and void without a passport.
- The only place you can renew passports is the passport office in London, UK, a place she could not get to.

The foolish adventurer did not cry, because she is very brave.

At 2:18am, whilst sitting in the lost and found with Kevin, the lost and found man, Kevin pointed out the arrival of Flight 6127. He directed the foolish adventurer to a door that lead to the tarmac and  pointed to an Air Asia flight. In a move that would never be permitted in the UK, Kevin then left the foolish adventurer to her own devices, whereupon she trotted across the tarmac of a working airport, without a high-vis vest and wondered whether now would be a good time to hijack a plane in a Jason Bourne style end to the story. (She didn't.)

Up the steps of the mobile stairs she crept, to be greeted by some mildly surprised cabin crew. She peered apprehensively into the pocket of seat 31C...

The passport was there.

Thanks be to God. Amen. Here endeth the lesson.