Well said FlapsForty - you've provided a perfect example of the point that I was trying to make about the high degree of experience, skill and above all professionalism required by CSDs/Pursers.
I think that this thread illustrates that the flight deck knows all too little about the skills of the people at the front end of customer service - the people who are, incidentally, the 'public face' of the airline.
It also shows that there's little understanding of the other people involved with airlines - from operations, crewing, scheduling, passenger service agents, dispatchers, engineers, administrators, sales and call centre staff etc etc. As I've said many times before, an airline is a team effort and at the moment it appears to the other players - including management - that senior pilots have closeted themselves away in their ivory towers and have no interest in sacrificing their swimming pools, expensive cars, yachts, private aircraft, private schools for their kids etc.
There's a saying about walking around in other people's shoes. Perhaps some of you guys should try it sometime!
Alfredo_Garcia - you'll find that the senior doctors are in fact managers as well (at least here in the UK - can't speak for anywhere else) - I suspect you're you're thinking of hospital line administrators which are a somewhat different category of people (think of them as CSDs compared with the Consultant as Captain...)