(Khoi Vinh’s tale of 24 hours of airline woe)

I’ve been in this position before, too. Airline incompetence can be a big issue, and I imagine that airline employees make mistakes due to complicated software or lack of experience.

The fast food industry has been installing order displays in drive-thru lines, so that orders taken by dictation can be checked by the orderer, even before getting a total. Before they existed, it was always a toss-up whether the order-taker heard all the special requests correctly, and the tedious back-and-forth repetition of the full order really isn’t as necessary when you have all the details in front of your face.

Now, if only I could see my itinerary changing in a screen in front of me, in clear readable terms, while I was talking with a customer service person tapping away at some arcane terminal. That would let me verify things instantly in the same way that the fast food confirmation screen works.