Originally Posted by JungleBus

I have my own story to add to the "gate agents making mindless decisions to preserve D-0" list. Two weeks ago my wife and I were trying to get down to Florida on the first day of Minnesota's spring break. Yeah, I know, but she's a teacher - we go when she's off, and we've had pretty good luck nonrevving during peak periods using creative routings. In this case, we narrowly missed a couple of flights and then went to our backup, a fairly empty flight to GRR, where there was an empty flight to Atlanta in the morning. We had listed but it was less than 30 mins when we tried to check in so the kiosk wouldn't let us; we just went to the gate. There was a single gate agent working it, we told him we were nonrevs but weren't checked in. He said no problem, there are a ton of seats, I'll get you on, just hang out. There were about 8 minutes left by the time he finished boarding. He started typing on his computer to check us in, couldn't find our listing for some reason, suddenly looked at his watch and exclaimed "I don't have time for this!" and ran down the jetbridge to close the aircraft door. It was D-6 and the plane left with 32 open seats. I politely discussed it with him when he came back up (he was able to find our listing then) and noted that as a captain at CPS, I had taken many delays to make sure DL employees got on. "Yeah, but you're a pilot, you can get away with that, we can't" was his excuse. It was another two days before my wife got out.