More Airport silliness

Had a business trip this week on United out of BDL to ATW.

I noticed something a little strange. At all of the United gates I was exposed to, there is a machine at the gate door that when you place you ticket in one end, it automatically cuts off and ejects your boarding pass at the other end for you to take onto the plane.

I assume that the intent was to eliminate a person having to man the gate during boarding.

Problem was, all of the machines were attended by an employee who took your ticket and fed it into the large, expensive machine for you, and then handed you your boarding pass stub after the machine spit it out. At one of the gates, the attendant actually tore off the stub like old times and then fed the remainder of the ticket into the machine. I guess the average American traveller is too stupid to figure out how to properly operate the machine so they had to re-staff the position.

Guess they should've done a few more focus groups prior to roll-out. No wonder United is going under. Do these people work for GM as well?