A year and two promotions later, I had dropped out and transferred "upstairs" to a generalist customer service job. I moved to Minneapolis, just an hour from my girlfriend, and worked as a ticket agent, gate agent, and baggage service agent. At that point I knew five distinct SABRE subsystems very well. Ticketing, gate, baggage, ramp (DECS), and flight operations (also DECS) are all handled differently in SABRE. I learned intuitively how VCRs work and could "pull" them out of defunct reservations and "push" them onto new ones, which made me the fastest re-booker at the station. I could sell a Zed fare in 30 seconds, and almost never needed to hand over a paper ticket to a customer, which meant that my end of day report was usually clean. In retrospect, SABREs green screen commands formed kind of a functional language in a real-time Vim-like environment.
I was laid off from US Airways in the wake of its America West reverse merger. I took a job with Carlson Wagonlit as a corporate travel agent. Carlson used a complicated mid-2000s web app instead of SABRE or Amadeus, and ultimately I was able to automate a large part of my job with an HTA application (JavaScript with system privileges on Windows NT). After I showed my work to our IT department at the insistence of my supervisor, who thought I was breaking the rules, a mid-career developer took me aside and gave me stern advice to leave Carlson immediately and seek employment as a programmer. I had no idea that software skills were worth anything, and quintupled my income overnight.
Fifteen years later, I remember the feeling of throwing bags onto conveyor belts like it was yesterday. I loved that job, and I loved SABRE.