“We’re definitely going to miss the flight,” my sister Meg said.

I looked at the clock. We still had two hours til take-off. I was optimistic.

“We’ve got time,” I said.

“Not if we can’t find the rental car place,” she replied.

We had filled up the gas tank on airport property, so one would think it would be easy to find the place to drop off the rental car.

But apparently adequate signage it not a priority at the Paris/Charles de Gaulle airport.

So we looked up Avis on Google maps and the first address we put in somehow, after 7 minutes of driving, lead us right back to the gas station from which we started.

I tried to call one of the five Avis locations on the airport property but no one answered. I called a second location and was told the number was out of service.

Meg searched her confirmation email for the return location, but none was listed.

Looking at Google maps, I said, “This one’s closest–let’s just go there.”

It was a single lane road lined with huge trucks going who knows where–as the road came to an abrupt dead-end. There was an Avis location–but it was the repair shop. Why would Avis not indicate this on their Google Maps profile? Perhaps their goal is not excellent customer service, but something more nebulous.

Meg found a place to pull over and started searching again while I hopped out to see if there was someone I could ask. There was no one.

Meg remembered she picked up the car at a terminal. So we headed to our terminal and finally a sign appeared — for rental cars. It did not specify returns. Nor Avis. But we followed and hoped for the best.

But, as would become a pattern, it seems Charles de Gaulle has limited itself to one directional sign and then assumes you can figure out the rest.

We could see the Avis booth, but the roads, for reasons unclear to either of us, would not lead us to it.

We stopped in the middle of the one-way, one-lane road that was taking us further and further away from our destination and asked two guys standing nearby. “You have to go back out and come back around–it’s the first left, not the second.”

Neither the first nor the second left was labeled as having anything to do with Avis nor rental cars. In fact, it was such a tight left turn, it was unclear that it was a turn at all. But we tried it anyway. And it worked!

The woman who greeted us when we finally pulled into a parking spot made the mistake of asking us how the rental was. Seeing and hearing our frustration, she kindly reminded us she was not at fault and we could have just “followed the signs.” I wanted to sneer, “When is the last time you tried to return a car to this airport?” because only someone who arrives at work on the metro would have had the nerve to tell us to “just follow the signs.”

Meg was still convinced we would not make our flight. I was still hopeful, though my faith would be tested many times in the next 1.5 hours.

To her credit, the Avis woman gave us good directions to get into the terminal building. We looked for Terminal 2G, but the oh-so-helpful signs only showed directions to Terminals 2A-2F. I felt like Harry Potter trying to find platform 9 3/4.

I asked the next uniformed person I saw and was told that to get to 2G, one must go to 2F and take the shuttle. How anyone is supposed to know this is still a mystery to me.

When we finally arrived at Terminal 2G, we learned AirFrance is trying to compete with other low-cost European airlines and, as such, has decided we can check ourselves in, print out the tags for our checked baggage, and load it onto the conveyor ourselves.

Which would be fine if the process actually worked.

We got our tags and headed to the conveyer belt station. Meg dutifully scanned the tag but the system told her there was an error. A second attempt yielded the same result. As her frustration level increased, I dashed off to find someone to help us.

The kindly AirFrance employee, when I told him the computer wasn’t working, asked, “Is the computer not working or are you not using it correctly?” He said it with a devious smile from which I can only surmise 1) his training did not include instruction on the appropriate times to use humor with customers and 2) AirFrance, like Avis, has no desire to win any customer service awards anytime soon.

As he was the only employee around, he closed off entry to everyone else and came to ascertain the problem. By this time, all of the computers had stopped working.

I confess I was quite happy to see the panic on his face. I wanted to give a devious smile and say, “I told you so,” but he was too busy speaking rapid-fire French into his walkie talkie and walking around looking at each computer in complete disbelief.

Luckily AirFrance has decided to keep the employees that are at the other end of the walkie talkie. Mr. Is-the-machine-not-working-or-are-you-not-using-it-correctly was able to restart our computer. He even checked us both in himself; I wondered if he’d be penalized for doing the job airline workers used to do that we’re now supposed to do ourselves.

We rushed off to security where I was surprised to see a live person checking our boarding passes. I weaved through the maze of stanchions to get to the security lines while Meg decided to duck under a few to speed up the process–until the man at the other end caught her eye and told her to go back and follow the rules like everyone else. Even though we were the only two people in the maze at the time!

There were only six people in front of us emptying their belongings into the ubiquitous plastic bins. But looks can be deceiving. The minutes ticked by, none of us moving. Meg noted those that spoke French were ushered over to another line. I recalled a study that showed changing lines doesn’t, statistically speaking, get you through any faster. Little did I know we would be outliers today.

I watched as the woman staring at the computer image of my bags pushed both of them to the side to be double-checked. Which wouldn’t have caused too much concern had there not been another six bags ahead of mine also waiting to be inspected.

I looked down the line of bags and saw the woman doing the second security check. Apparently her training taught her that it is best to do her job as slowly as possible.

I turned around to see Meg untying her boots for another security check. I missed the part where they gave her a full pat-down as I was too busy wondering if I would be able to ever work as slow as the woman doing the second check of the bags.

With four people still ahead of me, Meg took off to find out which gate we would be departing from, only to return a few minutes later. “They don’t announce which gate to go to until 30 minutes before the flight leaves,” she said.

It might take this woman that long to get to my bag, I thought, but kept my mouth shut 1) so as not to distract the woman from her job and 2) so as not to further agitate my sister.

I looked behind me to see the other security line devoid of passengers and two security men hanging out chatting. Apparently AirFrance decided security was the best place to waste spend their money. And in an effort to be sure they got no awards for customer service, they seem to have trained their employees not to help one another.

Meg later told me she’d overheard they’re “not allowed to move bags from one security line to another.” Which may explain why they completely shut down the security lane where I and the other stranded passengers were waiting as well as the one with the chatty we-have-nothing-to-do security guys and opened up two others further down. Only then did some of the chatty ones decide they were going to ignore their training and actually try to help. They then continued rule-breaking: they pulled some of the bags to two other security lines–but not mine.

By the time I was through, the young woman who had sent our bags for a second screening was being yelled at by a supervisor. I wish I’d had patience and the time to try to understand the French that was being yelled. I imagine it was something like, “You were trained to make their lives difficult as they pass through security, but you’ve taken it too far!”

The next thing I remember is Meg handing me an 8-inch-tall bottle of a fizzy alcoholic beverage. We looked down a staircase to see the other passengers for our flight clustering about the gate eager to be the first ones on. Meg and I decided not to join them. Sipping our fizzy drinks while looking down on them was a much better idea.

“Michael always wants to be the first one on board,” I told Meg, before taking another swig directly from the bottle.

“John is the same way,” she told me, smiling.

We were the last people to board the flight.