Airline bureaucracy

On Monday, after our original flight was cancelled and we were told we'd be put on a later flight from another airline, my sister and I tried to check into our new flight but were informed that although the seats on the plane were reserved for us, we had not been ticketed by our original airline. We had several hours before this new flight was scheduled to take off, so the fact that it took an hour and a half to straighten out this bureaucratic snafu only meant that our time was spent standing at service counters instead of sitting and reading. So I had little else to do but to reflect on the situation:

1. Our situation was a typical bureaucratic problem: the airlines need to keep track of hundreds of planes carrying thousands of passengers each, making sure each passenger gets onto the correct flight, and those who aren't supposed to do not. (In part, the system needs to be rigid because of security requirements put in place by the federal government, and behind it public political pressure.)
2. The airline thus develop procedures for categorizing individuals as belonging or not belonging on a given flight, and these procedures have several steps that are supposed to be carried out in a particular way: (apparently as we discovered on Monday), first the seat on the plane is "reserved"; then the individual is issued a "ticket" indicating that they are allowed to be on the plane; and then ticketed individuals are issued "boarding passes" that are the final marker that lets them get through the gate and onto the plane.
3. Problems arise when for whatever reason the regular procedures can't be fully followed. What happened on Monday--what is probably the most common cause of trouble--was that weather (in this case high winds) disrupted most of the flights on the entire east coast in the middle of the day, requiring the rapid reshuffling of hundreds if not thousands of passengers. The problem is particularly bad when the reshuffling crosses from one airline to another. What happens then (and if the attitude of the employees of both airlines on monday were any indication, the problem is quite common) is that there can easily be a mismatch of procedures: one side thinks they've done what they need to, but as far as the other side can determine, the status of the individuals who are being processed by the system hasn't yet reached a point that is expected and required for the next step to occur.
4. Usually, when dealing with bureaucracies, if one finds oneself stuck in between steps of a procedure that isn't proceeding like it's supposed to, the simplest response is to make a stink until one gets kicked up to a higher level of the bureaucracy. The hope is that one gets set to an officials who has the authority to override the regular procedures and arbitrarily attach the correct categorization to you.
5. The problem on Monday was that there appeared to be no such person with the prerogative to just, as my sister put it, write out a ticket for us by hand. Is this a result of security concerns? Downsizing in the airlines (there did appear to be insufficient staff to deal with the mass of delays from the win)? Irrational rationalization in which the computer system becomes the final arbiter, which regular desk staff lack the capability to override?
6. Oddly, one thing did work: even while we were being sent back and forth trying to get "ticketed," the text message flight status notification system was somehow correctly informed that we were on the new flight, and sent us regular updates on its status.