Usually you will see threads about how much airlines suck, but I have to share how this incredibly resourceful (and cute) AA employee named Stephanie made my day today.
The rough outline of the issue: For my big trip I had my airline tickets, however they were all paper tickets. What that meant was that, even though I could change my flights free of charge, I would have to get all my paper tickets reissued, in the country I would be at. That is, I would have to negotiate with a Chinese airline employee to reissue 10 tickets.
So, Stephanie set out to convert my paper tickets to electronic ones. All went well, up to "screen 24" where the summary field of the ticket exceeded the maximum number of characters allowed! (Because it concatenated all 16 flights) Essentially a Y2K problem.
All was lost it seemed, but when I stared at her blankly at the prospect of negotiating new tickets all over the world, she essentially invoked a conference call with several high AA employees.
In the end, 2 hours later, she hand-edited the field in the computer and thus convinced the system to give me electronic tickets.
Absolutely outstanding customer service.
rumborak