Free to painfully fly about the Internet.

We can debate the advantages and disadvantages of our technologically stoked society until we are blue in the face. For example, nothing beats a stealth mission to the robot-controlled grocery store. You swipe your secret club card, grab an electronic wand and cruise up and down the aisles scanning barcodes and popping the items into your reusable shopping bags, neatly aligned in the metal shopping cart. When finished, you wheel over to the self-checkout, scan your wand and pay by credit card. If your timing is right, you have not spoken to a single human. For grocery shopping, this process works reasonably well.

Booking airline tickets is an entirely different story.

I am currently our family's designated (and untrained) travel agent. When our son who lives in Florida wants to come home for a visit, he calls me up with his arrival and departure dates, and I go to work. For his Thanksgiving visit, my Internet travels took me from KAYAK.com, to Expedia, to Spirit Airlines, and finally to jetBlue. In the end, and after a couple of hours, I did acquire roundtrip tickets to and from Fort Myers. Like my grocery store experience, my interactions were robot-only. No humans were involved.

Near the end of his one week stay, he was called back to his office due to one crisis or another and had to return a day earlier than anticipated. Now, in the twentieth century, such an event required a quick call to your human travel agent who provided several options, and once a departure time was selected, new tickets were issued, and the problem was solved.

In today's world, where travel professionals have been all but eliminated, we are left to go one-on-one with the airlines, preferably through their website. In fact, in some cases, there is a cash incentive not to pick up the phone for human help. However, where there are intricate details that require working out, in times such as this, I pick up the phone and plead for human assistance.

Besides, I would rather spend my time doing something else besides booking tickets through the Internet maze. Sorry robots, we still need human travel agents. –Doug.