Paper tickets: Something to hold on to

The article “You’ll Pay the Price if You’re Still Living in the Paper-Ticket Age” (June 8) leaves out two excellent reasons people prefer paper tickets.

When you are at the mercy of an airline in a foreign locale and the telecommunications line goes down or becomes very slow, the computer misbehaves, the gate agent is hostile or any one of a hundred unforeseen things occurs at a critical juncture, it helps to have a piece of printed cardboard to thrust at a ticket agent.

True, you can keep a printout from your home computer to underscore your veracity, but that technique works much better in Minneapolis than in Mombasa, Kenya; Marseilles, France; or Montego Bay, Jamaica.

As for buying things over the Net, there is a real fear, not an irrational phobia, of identity theft. If you don’t key in your credit card number over the Internet, that danger is removed.

Identity theft exists and is growing.

John Thayer

Vallejo