Ok, it's not friday, but in the former colonies, we think of it as friday as we prepare to celebrate the feast of suckering the injuns into thinking they could trust the white man...

Why is it, when you purchase a ticket, check-in, request an upgrade, etc, that it seems like the CS agent has to type a novel on his/her keyboard just to tell the computer that you prefer an aisle seat.

I was wondering this at the Useless Scareways city office a couple days ago when the lady was happily transcribing War and Peace into her computer to tell it that there was a lost ticket floating about.

I asked her why she was typing so much, and she was evasive, saying that the system required codes and such for shorthand(!) purposes. Anyone here ever get a straight answer as to what the heck they are REALLY typing (my parinoid mind imagines they are rating us on appearance, fashion sense and politeness, which they feed into a central computer which tells the FAs whether or not to give us a choice of meals in 1st class)...or, better yet, ever been a CS agent??

Seems like an enormous waste of keystrokes to me, but, again, what the heck do I know...