There is a certain logic to this one I'm sure, and United says up front that they will decouple passengers from baggage in IRROPS: ground stop in Houston has screwed up many a schedule and we end up rebooked with a confirmed seat on something like the 5:00pm with a standby seat on something like the 4:30pm flight to Denver. Go over to standby and there are rumblings at that gate there will be a mechanical for that flight. Go back over to the gate where we have confirmed seats and ask to be taken off the standby list for the earlier flight because we just want to keep our seats on the 5:00pm flight that seems likely to actually be in the air on time.

Except that the GA doesn't get us off the standby list for the 4:30 flight, and we're listed as a no-show for that one. He eventually gets us rebooked back onto the 5:00pm flight despite our ticket being cancelled but our bags end up briefly in limbo. Get to Denver and we're told that our bags were scanned for the 4:30 flight but then our no show for that one meant that they may or may not have gotten pulled because our selves hadn't gotten on that plane.

So our bags got briefly lost in the system because we were trying to get on the flight we had seats for. Fortunately Schordinger's bags had indeed been loaded onto the 4:30 flight, which actually left somewhere around 6:00pm and we were reunited with them later on that night.