This one's purple, this one's yellow and they're both headed from Minneapolis to Half as Town, a small town in Colorado where I am the mayor.

But they'll take very different journeys.

The purple one's a carry-on and the yellow one's getting checked.

Its owner is entrusting the airport system of conveyors, scanners, carts, trucks and people to get his bag to Half as Town's forbidden merry-go-round at the same time as if not before he gets there even though he's self ploting and his bag is a bag.

So how do airports pull this trick off?

And what happens when they don't?

To answer, let's see what happens to these guys, property of, let's say, Chet Bagg and Carrie Ohn.

We're an hour before takeoff in Minneapolis, and while Carrie's presenting the TSA with a Ziploc full of shampoo, Chet hands a suitcase to the check-in agent who slaps on a bag tag with all his info written out, stored in this barcode and load it on a paper-thin RFID chip.

This way, no matter how high or low tech and air the bag travels through, they'll be able to read its info and keep Chet's stuff on track to Half as Town.

Chet's bag takes a conveyor to the baggage room, which at MSP is right below the ticketing counter.

Down here, seven miles of conveyor shuttle bags around to piers, each of which is assigned an upcoming flight.

Thanks to barcode scanners surrounding them, MSP's belts know which pier Chet's bag needs to get to and they automatically bump it around until it arrives.

At the pier, an employee unloads it onto one of two cars.

The first is for bags whose next stop is their final destination, but since Chet's connecting through Denver, his goes with all the other transfers.

About 45 minutes before takeoff, a driver towed both carts to the gate.

Meanwhile, Carrie's bag is also making its way there, dragged behind her as she weighs whether she has the time or gastrointestinal fortitude for airport Cinnabon.

At the gate, workers load all the checked bags into the cargo hold, keeping the Denver-bound bags separate from the ones making a connection.

Up above, Carrie shoves hers into the overhead and the plane takes off.

Upon arrival in Denver, Carrie yanks her bag down the aisle and off the plane, while Chet's bag comes out of the cargo hold.

And because this is the massive Denver International Airport, it's about to make a very long, very technologically advanced journey to its next gate, because why drive it over there when you can take what else?

A perpetual motion suitcase superhighway.

It's called the DCV, short for destination-coded vehicles.

And it's made up of over 19 miles or 30 kilometers of track, whipping 4000 little carts around the IA nonstop at roughly the speed of an electric scooter.

At this terminal, two DCV tracks make a loop; one going clockwise and the other going counterclockwise.

Chet's bag delays on a standard conveyor belt where it's scanned and bumped towards whichever one of those tracks will get it to its next gate faster.

An eye at the end of that conveyor belt sees when the DCV cart is coming and times the drop so that the cart doesn't even have to stop.

The DCV scans the bag too, so it knows what gate it's going to and which standard conveyor to dump Chet's bag onto to get there.

There it joins the other HAT-bound bags as Carrie wrestles hers into another overhead.

On the flight to Half as Town, Carrie watches an HAI video she downloaded which catches Chet's attention because he also loves HAI.

They spend the whole flight chatting about what good taste they have and go their separate ways when the plane lands.

Carrie towed her bag home and Chet heads to the baggage claim.

The airport is designed such that Chet's walk there takes about the same amount of time as unloading the plane and driving the bags over.

So once he gets to the carousel, he doesn't have to wait long.

But, oh, no. What's this?

The last bag just came out and Chet's wasn't there?

Uh, oh, it becomes one of the 0.059% of Chet's bags that gets mishandled.

Why?

Impossible to know. But here are the odds.

Chet complains to his airline and they upload a claim to World Tracer.

The bag finding software most world Airlines in over 2000 airports use.

When a bag surface is somewhere it shouldn't be, World Tracer uses the info on its tag or a description of its contents to match it to missing bag claims in the system and start the reunion process.

And because it's so ubiquitous, it can do that even if your bag slips to a wrong airport or airline.

So if back in Denver, Chet's bag is still zooming around the DCV for some reason, someone will plonk it into World Tracer then get it on the next flight from DIA to HAT.

But it might not be so easy.

World Tracer will keep its metaphorical eye out for Chet's bag for three months and if it doesn't pop up by then, the airline will compensate him up to $3800 for the bag and its contents and hooray.

Now they didn't lose the bag, they technically bought it and all of Chet's favorite pants.

In 95% of mishandling cases, the bag gets back to its owner and there's no buying or selling.

But that other 5% translates to airlines acquiring millions of bags every year.

So they need some plan for what to do with it all.

That usually means some kind of charitable donation.

But some places like the UK also send lost bags to auction houses.

But Chet lost his bag in the United States, meaning there's only one place it'll go: Scottsboro, Alabama.

There they've got a store the size of an entire city block called Unclaimed Baggage that collects and sells the contents of every bag lost on every major airline in our great nation.

At the time of writing, they've got this, this and $1000 bucket hat that's somehow half off.

And in a few months, they'll also have Chet's favorite pants.

But for now, Chet leaves the airport empty handed, regretting his unwillingness to carry his own stuff.

Dejected, he wanders into the local tavern for a sad boy pint.

And what, who's there? Could it be?

It's his friend from the plane, Carrie Ohn.

He tells her all about what happened to his suitcase.

They talk all night.

They fall in love.

Oh, wait, sorry, I got my HAI script mixed up with the Christmas movie I'm writing.

It's also about checked bags.

It's called Checking it Twice, and yes, we are still looking for fun.

At the end, Chet and Carrie go to Atlanta to see the big airport and take a side trip to Scottsboro, where they find Chet's favorite pants, the one he lost the day they met.

He buys them back and the world at last knows peace.

Ok. Now, hold on.

How did Carrie watch an HAI video on the plane back there?

Surely she didn't shell out for in-flight Wi-Fi, given that she didn't pay to check it back.

Of course not. No.

Carrie was able to download and watch HAI along with countless hours of amazing exclusive content from all her favorite creators with the help of this video sponsor, Nebula.

If you don't know Nebula, it's a creator-run streaming service I started with some friends a few years back that gives us an algorithm-free and free place to make and share our most ambitious and exciting projects.

Projects like Broey Deschanel's fascinating new series about how taboos like sex scenes are presented in film, or our series Logistics of X which dives way too deep on the inner workings of things like Search & Rescue, Commercial Fishing and the Hajj.

And if you like any of all these people's videos or okay, yeah, mine,

Nebula is the absolute best way to support us.

Plus you get access to early and exclusive content all without ads and downloadable so you can watch wherever, whenever, as Hannah Montana would say, "It's the best of both worlds."

So what are you waiting for? If you sign up using the link below, you can get access to all this for a full year or 40% off,

meaning you pay less than $3 a month and you never have to hear one of my ad reads again.

Thanks in advance.