At ORD, where does an elite (1P) go for assistance, if the check-in machine says "see agent"? There doesn't seem to be any kind of sensible queuing for human assistance at all!

I was leaving ORD on Thursday and only needed to print out a BP. I'd done OLCI earlier, with no problem, but didn't have access to a printer. I was at the airport something over an hour before my flight, but the BP wouldn't print; the machine just said "see agent".

But there's no obvious queue for "human-assisted checkin" - just the entrance to the banks of machine+human for baggage.

I showed the agent at the entrance to the queue my confirmation printout and 1P card and said that the machine said "see agent". She directed me to a short queue (3-4 people) at the far left end of the bank of machines (right next to the elite security). But there wasn't really anyone serving the queue - there were couple of desks with staff who were only taking baggage, not doing checkin. There seemed to be one desk with an agent, but she wasn't serving the queue I'd been directed to - people were coming to her desk from all over - she didn't seem to be paying any attention to the queue.

So things moved very slowly. One person ahead of me got annoyed and left ; the next person ahead of me eventually pushed her way up to the desk. (The queue seemed to be mostly composed of annoyed business travelers, so in that sense at least, I was in the right place.)

Finally, I pushed through to the desk and eventually got the agent. I gave her my confirmation printout and ID and she typed for a couple of minutes and handed me the BP -- I made the flight by about 5 minutes (and that was only because elite security was practically empty and it was a nearby gate).

The whole thing was a zoo...surely there must be some organized check-in queue at the major hub airport. What's the right thing to do - where is the correct queue and how do you actually get served when you get to the front of it?