Originally Posted by
SEA1K4EVR
Perhaps the GA was someone of authority... one time at EWR I was VDB'd and the GA there had to make a call to someone to get permission to put me on a EWR-DEN flight because if she added me it would be oversold by 1. She got the permission and did it. I think the agents have the ability to do it, but maybe not automatic authority to... sounds like in this case the agent should not have put you on that LAX-ORD flight..but lucky for you she did.
Either that, or she (or someone) had arranged that ahead of time. They could have noted the flight based on an prediction of what it looked like at the time (e.g., maybe 1.5 hours out, it looked like LAX-ORD would have some misconnects, but things cleared up later).