The next time you should feel the burning desire to book a van service to take you home from the airport, fight it. Fight for all you are worth. It will seem like a good idea. You will say to yourself, "How convenient this will be! I won't have to hunt for a cab! I'll pre-pay!" Any number of thoughtful and logical justifications will float through your mind. This is the devil's work. You must resist.

Failure to do so may result in the following scenario.

My three-hour flight from Kansas City landed on time at LAX. Due to a TSA mix-up, it contained only three screaming toddlers instead of the federally mandated five, which was only topped by the timely arrival of our luggage with only one last minute carousel change, two busted zippers and a sticky substance we choose not to think about. This utopia of travel bliss was not to last.

Carrying a hundred pounds of suitcases, laptops and carry-ons across three lanes of traffic (because my husband thinks wheeled bags are for wussies), we found our designated shuttle company representative. I gave him my carefully printed van itinerary with confirmation number and official pickup time, all prearranged and prepaid. Then we waited.

Thirty minutes went by, and I was cool.

Forty-five minutes went by and with it the stroke of midnight and New Year's. I was cold. My feet hurt in poorly chosen high-heeled boots, but still, I was cool.

An hour and a half later, I was not quite so cool, and our designated shuttle company representative started to get a little scared. I may or may not have had something to do with this. I deny everything. Nonetheless, he flagged down the competition's official representative to see about putting us on one of their buses, which proved to be unnecessary as our van arrived just before blood started to flow in the streets.

Now, this particular van served only the Westside. Not the Valley. Not Pasadena or Long Beach or Anaheim. Just this one relatively small corner of the city. It said so right on the sign. This might lead you to believe that the driver of this specifically designated Westside van would have even the vaguest notion of where, oh, the Westside is. You would be wrong.

You might also assume that said driver would either have a GPS system that he knew how to operate or a dispatcher he could call in the event he became hopelessly lost while trying to deliver out-of-town visitors under the mistaken impression that pre-paying, prearranging and pre-delivering their desired drop-off address to the van company would be sufficient to get them where they were going. This would also be wrong.

It went so wrong, in fact, that the driver gave up trying to take one out-of-town woman to her destination and was preparing to abandon her back at the airport at three o'clock in the morning after making her sit while going about his other rounds, assuming he ever found his rounds. I wouldn't know. With explicit, turn-by-turn instructions that had to be repeated several times, my husband and I managed to get him to drop us in the general vicinity of our apartment. Then we snatched the poor tourist and her luggage out of his grubby little hands and drove her to her friend's house ourselves.

She went willingly. Trusting herself to two strangers in a big city was preferable to her van-hell. Fortunately for her, we almost never hack up hitchhikers, and when we do, we're very careful to clean up nicely.

I live four miles from LAX. It took me three hours to fly from Kansas City to L.A. It took me four hours to get from LAX to my house. So, dear readers, when you think of booking that shuttle van, think of me and take a cab.