Just one more thing I want to keep in mind for the next time:

There are sometimes that you dont get the correct city pairs at the ZED ticket, but it is always worth to try to check if the airline is willing to accept you for a different flight that the ticket shows.
In Iberia, we always do it, so maybe you had a BCN-CDG ZED, they would have accepted it for the OVD-MAD.

Also it is worth to talk to the station manager of an airlines where you know that you have an agreement with, if you dont have any more tickets; many times they will be able to issue ID80 or ID90 tickets if you can prove you are an airline employee or relative, so you could have asked to AA to send a fax to the local station. This time wasnt too much, but imagine taking a bus somewhere further could be a night mare.

It happened to me once in Los Angeles with Delta, years ago, they issued like a interline ticket that cost me not many dollars to be able to fly to Chicago via Atlanta, so I could buy tickets on Iberia there. I had no other ticket but LAX-LHR with BA, and I couldnt get any flight in two days. It was at a very last minute, and I only had to show my airline card. Luckily for me, Delta was very generous and didnt charge me very much (around 100$).

In the future virtually everyone will be able to buy their own ZEDs on a web site, which will help to get everything easier, eliminating the problems of going to the ticket counters, buying almost 2,000$ on ZEDs for backups, issuing ticket by ticket, listing, and all these things. We already have some of these agreements with Spanair, SAS, Finnair, Air Berlin, ... with the website WWW.MYIDTRAVEL.COM.
Also we have electronic interline agreements with Japan Airlines, LAN, Tarom, Binter Canarias and some more. So I only have to call to any city ticket office or going to the airport and they issue Electronic ZED tickets, so no more paper anymore.

But anyway, in the midtime I enjoy very much the priviledges that our jobs give to all of us.