All:

Hoping to gain some wisdom on how to interact with WTC about an issue over which I had no control, but has cost me a good bit of money and time.

At IM Santa Rosa on May 11, I finished the bike, put my helmet, bike shorts, jersey, and bike shoes in the T2 bag, tied up the bag, and handed it to a volunteer. That was the last I ever saw of it.

I finished the race, went to pick up my gear. They had my morning clothes bag and my T1 bag, but no T2 bag. A couple of volunteers looked around for it, but came up with nothing.

I found a volunteer captain, and he looked around for it as well- nothing.

He asked me to put down my contact information on a sheet that they had, so I did, along with what looked like 2 more pages of people doing the same thing.

I e-mailed race support, detailing what went missing, how it went missing, and a picture of me from the race photogs (so they would know that I wasn't inventing what gear I had on).

I got a response from Maggie saying, "Thank you for your email, and I greatly apologize for the delayed response. I will double check with our Race Director on the items Lost and Found after the race, however, we do not currently have transition bags for [my number] left over from the race. Let me ask around in the meantime and see if there is another place it would be."

That was nice. So I responded with, "Thank you for your attention to the matter. In the event that my bag cannot be located, what are next steps?"

That was on May 22. No reply.

So on May 29, I followed up with, "Good morning Maggie: It has been a week since my last e-mail and I have not received a response. In the event that you are unable to locate my bag, what are the next steps?" No reply to that one either.

I have sent two other e-mails as standalones, both of which have received "ticket" numbers indicating receipt, but no response to them or to any other ones.

Has anyone else experienced this? Is this sort of inattention common to WTC when they screw up?