For the travel nerds amongst us - long journeys

Benevolent company J recently launched a new internal travel system here in the UK. I have IT colleagues who were involved in it; apparently this is a huge cost savings as it's very expensive for a 'person-issued' ticket as opposed to a self-administered booking. In addition, the application has all sorts of bells and whistles built in to enforce various policies. However, it seems to lack a bit on the 'common sense' side of things, but perhaps that it not programmable. ;-)
It is smart enough to tell me that 'you have chosen a fare that is more than 100 GBP than the next closest fare and within 3 hours, enter your mandatory comments in the box which will be reviewed by management'. I need to remember to stifle any sarcasm before I start typing as it starts to come out like, 'Will miss the meeting start time of 9 AM by several hours due to the 13 hour overnight connection in Los Angeles' and 'Will negate cost savings due to extra hotel night due to connecting flight leaving one day later.' Behold my options for the London to Chicago route (sorry, you need to click on the jpg to expand it.)

Remember that a London-Chicago direct flight will come in slightly under 9 hours...so it's fascinating that I can fly over Chicago and go all the way to California with Air New Zealand, and even better, with a 13 hour overnight layover at LAX. It's a similar story for Stockholm and Istanbul, except that those journeys are first going in the opposite direction of where I need to go. The third is magnificent, as I've never been to Asia, this could be my golden opportunity to fly Cathay, plus the added bonus of an overnight in a German airport, in addition to a second German airport in the same trip!

Apparently they used the same logic for domestic routes as well. I will wrap up my trip in Milwaukee, and then I will head home to Philly for a few days. There are a few direct options, USAir and Frontier come to mind, for this short 2 hour flight. It's much more interesting to instead take 10 hours however...
because to travel to Philly on Hungarian Malev Airlines via Canada would probably make for a good story.