Toward the end of my time at my airline, I was offered the opportunity to work temporarily in Ticketing rather than my usual job of handling Business Class passengers and frequent flyers. I was offered the opportunity because I had taken a training class in basic ticketing and most people had not had any ticket training. There were only six people in ticketing, and one of them was going on Maternity Leave for several months, leaving them very short-handed.
At the time, electronic tickets were just starting to be used by our airline, and if the trip involved both us and another airline, the tickets had to be paper. Our department also helped the airport ticket people who seemed to frequently have problems issuing tickets.
To start with, I didn’t have anything to do with tickets. For my first couple of weeks, I was assigned one of their other peripheral duties which was processing the collection of change fees. This was very simple to do and took almost no training. The backlog for it was really bad. The people in ticketing had been too busy with other duties to do this task for some time. There were definitely some people who had made changes to their tickets and been told they had to pay a change fee but had traveled before we got around to trying to collect the fee. The system did not allow the change fees to be collected after travel, so some people got very lucky.
But that’s not what my story is about; it’s just backstory.
After doing just this for about ten days, the department manager came to talk to the three of us on duty just as two of us were about to leave. This was a Friday night at about 6:00. He informed us that two of the other people in ticketing had been let go effective immediately That left the three of us plus one other person, who was off that day.
I was scheduled in at 9:00 the next morning, and one of the people who had been let go had been scheduled to come in at 8:00. So, suddenly, I was going to be there on my own with really no knowledge of what I was supposed to be doing. The next person wasn’t scheduled until 2:00 in the afternoon.
I was going, “What am I supposed to do? I don’t know anything about issuing tickets or helping the airports with their issues!”
The manager, for whatever reason, was sure I would be fine while I was having a panic attack just thinking about it. My coworker, who was the one scheduled in at 2:00, handed me her phone number and said I could call her with any problems that came up and couldn’t wait.
And of course, there were a couple of calls from the airports that I had no idea how to handle. I called my coworker, but all she could do was talk to the airport and talk them through it. For the second problem, I couldn’t even get through to her, so I had to tell the airport to call back.
My only salvation came at about 12:30 when another coworker came in who used to work in ticketing, and she offered to help me out with anything she could.
Finally, at 2:00, the other ticket agent came and handled things for the rest of the day while I went back to the only thing I was trained for
I was off the next two days, and when I came back, the manager had rearranged the schedule so I was no longer on my own. He quickly set about finding other people to work in ticketing. I took the training to become a full-fledged ticketing agent, and they brought over someone from “employee travel” who could issue tickets. A couple of months later, after I had been trained, the manager decided that he liked my work better than hers and let her go even though she had a lot more experience.
The coworker on Maternity Leave came back, and all was well again.