Oh god, as a person who has bid reserve (even when able to hold a hard line) for 3 years at Eagle, I've seen some of the worst and most useless utilization of pilots before.

My personal favorite: I am called to do a ORD-ROC turn. No biggie. Show up, do my stuff, pax are boarding, near the end another FO pops his head up and says he is the original FO - his flight got in earlier and he wanted to pick up the rest of his flying. But CS would not put him on the outbound leg, just the return. So he was going to dead-head there while I flew, and he was going to fly back while I dead-headed. We called CS and said why not put him on both legs "We don't want to take a delay". Best part? Both legs were oversold and they had to buy passengers off at $500/pop.

When the system gets screwed up due to wx, they have so many guys deadheading around that they run out of pilots quicker because so many are needlessly deadheading around.