On Monday, I was scheduled to fly home after spending the holidays with my family. Due to a maintenance issue with the plane, after sitting on the runway for a couple hours we were herded off and moved to a pre-existing flight. The crew was obviously exhausted, and while very accommodating (they had voluntarily stayed on when they learned passengers would otherwise be stuck despite already having worked hours beyond their normal shift), they didn't discuss what those with connections should do.

By the time we took off - 3 hours after the scheduled departure - it was too late for me to make my next flight. When I got off the plane in Minneapolis, I had no clue what to do. The airport was entirely absent Delta staff, which was rather impressive considering its massive size. I spent the next hour and a half - by then it was after midnight - calling Delta and being passed from representative to representative, none of whom seemed particularly concerned about the situation (for whatever reason - perhaps clairvoyance - the most common solution was to forward my call to baggage claims, who were understandably confused as to how they could help me). After essentially being told I was SOL a couple times, I finally got a rep who explained to me that my connection had been rescheduled for 6 AM (I dryly asked whether they had planned to inform me of this fact, which she did not find amusing) and that while a room was available since the delay was the result of a maintenance issue, no Delta employees were left in the Minny airport - sorry!

At that point, I finally started to get a little angry, at which point she put my on hold and managed to locate a baggage agent to give me a motel room voucher. I repeatedly asked about my baggage, and she said it would meet me at my intended destination. I finally managed to get a motel shuttle and ended up back in my room at 2 AM.

At this point, there's the sole bright spot of the story - there's no way in hell I was going to wake up in 2 hours to catch a shuttle back to the airport, so I hopped online and was able to change my flight to 11 AM free of charge. It's a good thing I did, because the rep also omitted that my new flight plan involved overshooting my destination by 500 some miles, then connecting and retracing my steps.

I also called some friends I was supposed to meet the next morning for a belated XMas, and told them we'd have to do it the day after (Wednesday).

The next morning, I boarded with relative ease and flew to my destination. My luggage, however, did not. I was told it had been rescheduled to come on an 11 PM flight - no offer to reimburse me or provide anything to tide me over. They offered to ship the luggage to me (the airport was 3 hours from my house) but being that it contained gifts for the friends I was meeting the following morning, I insisted that I personally pick it up that evening (at that point, my trust in Delta had been considerably reduced, and in any event they wouldn't have been able to deliver it until the next evening at the earliest).

Accordingly, after I paid the $160 necessary to release my car from long term parking, I hung out all day in a small town without a shower or clean clothes, and presumably with the breath of a dragon considering my diet had been coffee and scones for 24 hours. At midnight, I drove back to the airport - only to discover the only airport in existence that closes shop from 12-4AM.

Having told the baggage rep that I wanted my luggage set aside (it would have been nice if she mentioned that I couldn't actually pick it up when it came in) and under no circumstances shipped, I thus had to spend another night without a shower or clean clothes - not the end of the world, but at this point I was getting pissed. I showed up at the airport at 6 AM the next morning, and after a half hour of whispers and confusion amongst the Delta staff (unlike the phone reps, the live staff was very nice and seemed genuinely embarassed), I was informed that my luggage had departed Minneapolis as scheduled the night before, but had never arrived.

Since I had been spending nearly a month with the family, the luggage contained nearly all my clothes - some of it nice, at least for a broke law student - all of my textbooks for this semester (a gag-worthy sum), some relatively inexpensive but (I hoped) thoughtful gifts, and all of my shower stuff (which is rather extravagant for a guy and basically causes me no end of grief whenever a girl uses my shower).

This has been the worst 3 days ever, and I have a feeling its about to get worse. In valuating the contents of my luggage, which now appears to stand at around $2500 and will probably increase as things occur to me, I noticed that the reimbursement slip states "ORIGINAL value". As a law student, weasely language like that sets off alarm bells - does this mean that they're going to try to depreciate everything? Even the textbooks which are less than two weeks old? Nearly all the clothes are less than a year old - the luggage is a couple years

In addition, I'm broke right now, and I need fresh interview clothes and textbooks stat. I already dropped $80 today replacing my toiletries (toothbrush, towel, soap, razor, etc), and I'm at a loss to determine how I can replace the textbooks in time for Friday.

I figured I'd solicit some advice from experienced fliers - should I take any steps to ensure that Delta addresses the situation professionally and promptly? Is there any way for an immediate partial recovery of enough money to buy textbooks? And what happens if I buy the textbooks say tomorrow and then the luggage shows up Friday?

Thanks in advance for any advice or experience that may prove helpful! Sorry to be so vague about what I want to know - I haven't flown much until recently, but given my career choice I anticipate my time in the air to increase exponentially over the next couple years .