Frustration to the Nth degree

So here I am in Santiago de Compostela. The city is so beautiful, so alive and so peaceful all at the same time, but for the past 2 days I haven´t been able to enjoy any of it because of a little incident that happened to me in the Madrid Airport before I took off to Santiago. This post will be copied and pasted from a couple of emails that I wrote to Timi and Lala because I don´t feel like going over the whole thing once again.

(2 days ago)
I´m completely depressed in Santiago de Compostela in the north of Spain in Galicia at an internet cafe and I feel like I want to kill myself. At the Madrid airport when I was going through baggage security with the x-rays and all of that, they asked me to take my laptop out and put it into a different gray box to go through the xray. I put it in, put my backpack into a different box, then took my backpack, got on the plane and left. Then standing at the Santiago airport bus station I realized that I never put my laptop back in my backpack... I thought I was going to throw up. I felt (and still feel) like the most irresponsible stupid person ever. Then again, I´ve never really done anything like this before. I´m late everywhere, all the time, but I´ve never lost anything of importance in my life. This Canadian guy that I met at the bus stop watched me go through all of the stages of grief right there on the street - denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. And the the five stages all over again, all in about 5 minutes. Right now I can´t find one reason why somebody at the baggage check didn´t just pocket my laptop, but nevertheless I´ve been trying to reach Madrid lost and found for 2 days straight with no success... I hate everything about the Madrid airport right now and I want to kill them all and then kill myself. I know the laptop isn´t even that expensive and I can probably pay for it in 2 weeks worth of working full time, but this put and enormous damper on my trip. Santiago is beautiful and I can´t seem to enjoy it at all. I´m gonna have snap out of this soon or the rest of this trip is going to be ruined...
(about 2 days later)
After having talked to about 15-20 (this is not an exaggeration) phone operators (Spanish and English speaking at different times) at the Madrid Airport, after the lost luggage department´s phone number has been broken for the past 2 days, after the back-up phone for the department has been broken for about 2 days as well, after crying to the only American phone operator named Daniel at the airport and him trying to tell me to please not cry, after more frustration that I have ever endured with any sort of administrative system, after spending over 40 euros on my fucking good for nothing Vodaphone mobile phone, after finally figuring out that buying a phone card would be cheaper, and after explaining to a lady at left luggage at Madrid airport Terminal 4 (whose phone apparently got fixed only this morning) what my laptop looks like and that the background photo is Plaza de Corredera in Cordoba decorated for christmas with a giant christmas tree in the middle made completely out of red poinsettia plants (this is all in Spanish by the way), she finally tells me... that my laptop is sitting pretty on their shelf and I can pick it up whenever I like. I will now be spending Christmas Eve in the Madrid Airport (unless I want to pay for a hostel...which I don´t) waiting for my flight from Madrid to Barcelona on the 25th.

The problem with this is that I have spent the past 4 months defending the way that the Spanish conduct business, bring you coffee a bit late, take forever to bring you your check at a restaurant, take siesta for longer than needed... all these things that I thought were nice and relaxing... but I am at the end of that line. The level or service in this country is absolutely ridiculously low and I can´t stand it. I still love Spain and I want to come back and all that, but I have never been more frustrated with any administrative thing in my life. The telephone number was broken, the other telephone number was broken as well, and there was no back up, NOTHING. This just would not happen at LAX. There´s always someone, there´s always a backup, there´s always another phone number to transfer to or something. Here... nothing. I´ve been so frustrated that this frustration hasn´t let me go yet. I still feel nervous inside even thougth I know I found my laptop and it´s there and it´s working (since the lady could look at my background photo...heh). When I go back there I want to bring a baseball bat with me... But anyways... All is better now. I´m out an extra 100euros because of this ordeal and probably a few nerve connections in my brain have died (if that´s even possible), but all in all, I´m in one piece and things could be A LOT worse. Now, back to being me again.