A Plane Ride That Was No E Ticket

I read recently that airline service in America was getting worse, and I’m here to tell you that’s true. I’m not speaking of major deficiencies, of which there may be many, but of an airline’s inability to adjust to simple problems. I have an infuriating example.

Two of our grandchildren had been visiting for a month. On the day of their return to Portland, we couldn’t find their plane tickets. We searched the house with the intensity of dope-sniffing beagles but still no tickets.

Perhaps they’d been stolen by space aliens or mistaken for lettuce and chopped up in a Caesar salad. This much I know: I did not scalp them for a higher price and then claim that I lost them in order to cheat United Airlines. These were, after all, plane tickets, not seats to a Laker playoff game.

Wisely, my wife had made copies and, this being an age of electronic wonders, we felt certain that a United agent would be able to tap a few keys, recognize we had bought them in the first place and issue duplicates. It would take, at best, an extra seven minutes of their time and maybe six more little pieces of ticket paper.

Bernie McShane, a pleasant lady with a Big Airline Smile, was at the LAX ticket counter. When I told her my story and gave her a copy of the tickets, the smile faded and a darkness filled her face. It was as though I had ordered her to fly me to Cuba.

After consulting what must have been a guidebook for those attempting to commit ticket fraud, she said we’d have to buy new tickets. United Airlines, America’s second largest carrier, did not keep copies of paper tickets, only electronic tickets.

I am famous for my look of disbelief. My eyes widen and my head bobs backward as though avoiding a punch in the face. I gasp. Bernie McShane, unimpressed, was smiling again. It is no doubt a United Mandate: “When unable to deliver service, smile. They’ll remember you for that.”

Regaining my composure, I explained that the paper tickets were issued in the first place by a computer. Electronic whizzes foresaw people like me who lose tickets. That’s why God invented the hard drive. My tickets must be in there somewhere.

I held up the copies. Tickets are crowded with numbers. There is a tour code, an airline code, a destination code, document numbers and numbers that do not seem to have a specific reason to exist, like manatees and snail darters. “Surely,” I said to Bernie McShane, “within these numbers there is confirmation that I bought these tickets and am entitled to duplicates.”

I mean, here is a company whose electronic equipment guides huge jets through sleet and lightning strikes and zero-visibility fog to safe landings under tortuous conditions, and it can’t figure out how to give me duplicate tickets?

“I’m sorry,” Bernie McShane said, “but that’s the way United works.”

I wasn’t through. I pointed out that on three occasions United had lost my luggage, causing me great hardship and emotional pain. “In one situation,” I said, my voice burning with remembered indignation, “I was forced to wear the same underwear for three days. But not once did I charge United a lost underwear fee. You owe me, Bernie McShane!”

What she did in response to my argument was to summon Loreto Acevedo, who wore the title of service director like a master sergeant in the Marines. Though impressed by her grim demeanor, I still would not lie on my back with my feet in the air like a small dog in a pose of subjugation.

I repeated the whole story to Acevedo who, without even the trace of a smile, brushed me aside like a fly on the sugar and said I’d have to buy new tickets. Period. I felt if I continued to argue, two strong men would drag me off and throw me into the street, while my humiliated wife and startled grandchildren watched. Then I would be towed away from the white zone like an illegally parked ’57 Ford.

So I paid another $149.50 for two more tickets only to hear Bernie McShane say, “We’ve got another problem. The flight has been oversold.”

“We have reservations!” I cried, bobbing backward, “and it’s still 45 minutes to takeoff!”

“The reservations weren’t held,” she said, a little incredulous herself, “because there were no paper tickets. The reservations are attached to paper tickets.”

My face darkened and my head wagged from side to side like a shark ready to strike, but just in time Master Sgt. Acevedo got my kids on the plane, and Bernie McShane put on a happy face and returned to a normal life.

Later I called a spokesman for United who said that what happened was standard procedure for all airlines. I should have gotten electronic tickets, and all this would have been avoided. Then he added darkly, “There are fraud considerations.” No doubt a gray-haired man with a wife and two grandchildren in tow was making a fortune ripping off airlines with fake tickets. One can readily understand why they were suspicious.

I found the tickets the next day. I had placed them neatly in an envelope. As it turned out, the wrong envelope. Now I’m going to try getting back my $149.50. But I’m putting Johnnie Cochran on a retainer first.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. He can be reached at al.martinez@latimes.com.