Now this sounds like a story please do tell
Amazing
I guess PanAm was in trouble, so they were awarding triple miles. Those were also the days of paper tickets (and when you redeemed a flight award you also got a car rental coupon to go along - though I never used those). You could choose to get a certificate, which you would exchange for a ticket at a ticket counter, or a ticket.
So in essence what you had was multiple points of interaction where you might get someone to give you more or better than the "rules" say. Then there were also "games" people played with the ticket coupons, which were commonly stapled to boarding passes (don't forget to take a stapler along with you to the airport), or some boarding passes were even structured as a "pocket" to accommodate the flight coupon from the ticket.
When DL took over, some agents couldn't decipher the difference between an award WITHIN Europe (TLV was considered Europe back them) and an award TO Europe, which gave us some rich award tickets at dirt cheap mileage redemptions.