U. S. Airway

I should have known that the low fare to fly direct from Portland, Maine to Paris through Philadelphia couldn't go as smoothly as the price!!!! I and my 2 travel friends leave Portland with 2 carry ons, the one for the overhead and a smaller one/purse size for under the seat for our Thur - Mon quick trip. As we go thru the door to the gang way, one of our group has forgotten to put a name tag on her bag and grabs one, fills it out as we slowly descend and sure as shooting we have to gate check our larger of the 2 bags because they are using a mini size plane!!! Arriving in Philadelphia is the problem, we descend stairs onto the tarmac go over to retrieve our bags and 2 of us (out of my grp) are told, as a number of other passengers, that we cannot collect our bags there because they are not tagged!! Not tagged? Who was supposed to tag these at the gate in PORTLAND. so we could pick them up in Philly......our friend that put this stupid little name tag on hers got her bag but no one told us that we had to do their job there in Portland or we couldn't get our bag in Philly!!! So first, I blame the stupid group in Portland who you entrust to do their jobs correctly as being complete idiots. I have to say that there was an very offensive, rather large Afro-American person( I can't say lady as she was far from that!!!) with folded arms practically blasting her commands in our faces and not letting us pick up our bags that were sitting right there even though I suggested that she look at the identification on the bags and then look at my Passport. We were to go inside and to this unknown carousel and retrieve them there. Of course she had no clue as to where the carousel was located nor did she try to investigate for us and at this point had this young girl passenger in tears over her bag!!!! We go inside, track down this carousel, which I might add is outside of the TSA check point. There was a young Afro-American young male taking off a couple of bags and calling names of people that we recognized from our plane but not ours nor many others on our flight had their bags arriving(including this poor young girl still crying). After standing there for a few minutes and knowing that we had a connection to make, my friend and I grabbed him and explained what happened out side with our flight and that he needed to find our bags as we had another international flight to catch (thank God we had an hour and