Your right, the UA agent could have done that BUT the NW agent that rebooked her could have done it to begin with. The agent simply rebooked her without reissuing the ticket and sent her on her way, leaving the reissuing problems up to her and the UA agent.
Also sometimes one airline can't just simply take control, I've run into the problem where I've tried to get control from another airline and they'll tell us simply "send the passenger to the desk" so don't put the full blame on the UA agent NW shares some of the blame in this.
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