Yup, many of us have honed our OLCI skills to get the lowest sequence number possible, and set our outlook calendars or alarm clocks to be prepared to hit <enter> just as the 24 hour point is ticking past.

I am surprised nobody came up with an automated way to do OLCI. The analogy is a "sniping" service for eBay ... these services have you enter in all your details in advance, and wait until about 7 seconds before an auction closes, so that if you outbid someone, they won't have an opportunity to increase their bid. I personally think bidders who use sniping services are insuffrable cowards, but it's becoming a widespread tactic.

So what I could see is a similar service that logs you into continental.com 24 hours and 30 seconds before your flight departs, selects "Check-In" and waits 31 seconds before submitting the check-in request, and rapidly clicking through the appropriate screens until you get to a boarding pass, which gets faxed to the number you provided. Voila, you're checked in.

Such an "OLCI-sniping" service would be wonderful, no?

Of course, it wouldn't guarantee being sequence number 1. Someone who has checked in for a connecting flight inbound that connects to the flight for which you want to check-in would have already been assigned a boarding pass hours earlier ...

PS sequence numbers also facilitates quick access to your reservation by GAs and TAs ... if you're sequence number 007, they can simply pull you up as sequence number 7 instead of typing in B-O-N-D, J-A-M-E-S. And so on.