Plane Conversations

Let me let you in on a little secret – I’m not a very patient person.  Everyone who knows me is rolling their eyes in a big way right now.  (“You don’t say!”)  Standing in line for anything is a trying event for me.  Standing in line at a ticket counter is liable to send me torquing through the ceiling.  The lines move so slowly and, since I’ve done that job, I know that passengers can be processed much faster than they usually are.  And don’t even get me started about those kiosk thingys – if I wanted to process my own ticket, I’d still be a ticket agent.  There are many things on this earth I simply cannot do – arithmetic, for one; however, under normal circumstances, I can burn through a line a passengers rapidly. 

Don’t get me wrong, I know that weird things happen (try exchanging a Gulf Air ticket at an American Airlines ticket counter and see how long you’re standing there) and I know that there are agents who are new.  Everyone has to be new at something sometime.  Just like a brand new agent in Lexington I was working a flight with.  This poor guy was just back from the Learning Center in Dallas and really still had stage fright.  I was processing one passenger when a second passenger approached the new agent.  My passenger was a standard transaction, but his passenger needed to exchange his ticket.  The new agent couldn’t remember how.  The passenger wanted to look at alternate flights.  The agent couldn’t remember how.  Finally, the passenger asked after looking at the guy’s name tag, “Can you make change, Chris?”  I felt badly for the guy.  I’d been there - just back from Dallas with a head so full of new knowledge that my ears were leaking, yet, I couldn’t even remember how to log onto the mainframe.  Every transaction was terrifying. 

Rewind.  That’s right, I said mainframe.  It was a long time ago, after all.  We were working on a DOS program in what is now called “native Sabre.”  Sabre was the computer system and we communicated with it via long formats.  The format to exchange that man’s ticket could have looked something like: 

W‡S1*QYBB‡S2*QY‡FA/CCASH/0.00/10.00US*EFCASH‡ET0481234123123/A/0481234123001/01MAR03LEX‡AA        ‡V1-4* 19JAN‡ED/NO REFUNDS

And that’s if he had paid for his original ticket with cash and was paying the additional collection with cash.  It’s been a long time and that format may not be exactly right, but you get the idea – it’s hardly simple. 

Even so, I find myself tapping my feet, sighing and checking my watch when I have to stand in those creeping lines, knowing that even after I’m done there, I will have to stand in another creeping line to go through security.  Traveling with a group of friends to a football game is so much simpler on a chartered aircraft.  We can make the trip in a single day for about the same cost as driving plus hotels and meals.  AND, I don’t have to sit in the car for hours or wait at the ticket counter and security for what seems like hours.  I can leave from an airport near my home, show up at departure time, walk right on and away we go.  Let’s see – gathering cobwebs or making tracks?  Not a tough choice.

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