Midwest Airlines Midwest Miles - Understaffed at MKE?

Tom Haudricourt, who covers the Brewers for the Journal Sentinel, tweeted about his experience waiting to board a YX Connect flight this A.M. to PIT:

Midwest Airlines had one woman working four gates at Mitchell Field this morning. I know they've had cutbacks but she was frazzled.

Pittsburgh departed from the hammerhead, so the gate is two jetways, one for D46/47 and another for D48/49. There were four planes at the hammerhead, three departing in the 7:20-7:40 range and then other at 9:00.

From what I can piece together, 46 had the 9:00am LAX plane, 47 had inbound MSP/outbound DFW, 48 had an inbound CRJ going out to CLE, and 49 had an inbound CRJ going out to PIT.

Both PIT and CLE took notable delays (like 15-25 minutes) and DFW took a small delay.

The hammerhead normally should have at least two or three agents running the podium when it is in use like this. It's possible that more than one agent was there but other agents were:

--Pulling tickets at one or the other jetway
--Trying to swing the jetway from one plane to the other. I've seen agents struggle for several minutes with getting the jetway at D47 onto the CRJ more than a few times.

If only one agent was really running the entire hammerhead, then there would have been no agents at the gate podium the entire time that DFW boarded, the entire time that CLE boarded, and the entire time that PIT boarded. I would guess there was at least one more who pulled tickets, but that still left one person at the podium. Perhaps there were sick calls and they were short-staffed this morning. (We four people on a team of six call in sick today.)

I can imagine clearly what things were like in the hammerhead area this morning with these for-no-good-reason delays and a flustered/frustrated agent, short staffed or not.