OK I can't resist one more story.

A few weeks ago we were flying SEA-ORD on a UA 757 and my wife and I were in 8DE. Pretty decent seats, so I wasn't so upset when we were at spots 3 & 4 on the upgrade list (1P isn't so much ) and didn't get called for upgrades.

We were sitting there and they were actling like they were going to close the door. The purser and FAs were standing around in front of us and the guy in 9A started saying "there's still a seat in FC! They told me that it was full! You have to let me have that seat!" The purser did not like his bad attitude and stepped out to talk to the gate agent outside. She came back in and I blithely mentioned that we were probably ahead of him on the list (since 1&2 on the list were given seats... someone else hadn't shown up yet). She latched onto that and told him that others were head of him and went out to talk to the agent. It turned out that the last FC passenger was just taking his sweet time getting there and FC filled up but it just goes to show you: a bad attitude is NOT the way to get an operational upgrade.