Not yette

Scene 16. Ma Nuit avec Yvette. Juliette is telling Yvette of her experiences booking a domestic ticket in a Japanese travel agency.

...

Juliette: One air ticket from Tokyo to Fukuoka. Domestic flight. It should have been simplicity itself.

Yvette: And it wasn’t?

Juliette: Step one: agent goes to one computer and looks up flights. Writes down a selection of flight numbers and departure times on a piece of paper and brings them back to the desk and shows me. I pick an evening flight the 19:05.

Yvette: No printout?

Juliette: No printout. So then she goes away again to another computer and types in my name, flight number, age and passport number, and it prints out an itinerary and she shows me.

Y: Not the ticket?

Juliette: Just the itinerary I say OK. Now she goes to a third computer and types in my name, flight number, age and passport number again.

Yvette: That’s for the ticket?

Juliette: No, that’s to check for seat availability. So now she comes back a fourth time, all this walking I’m surprised she’s not whistling ‘I love to go a-wandering’ and says there are seats available.

Yvette: Now You’ve got a ticket?

Juliette: Wait! She then fills in a form which is an application for the ticket. She takes it out to a back room and several minutes later comes back and says she will telephone when the ticket has arrived.

Yvette: And how long is that?

Juliette: Two days. Hi-tech computer systems? E-ticketing has not landed here yet.

...