Originally Posted by flyerCO

Howeveryou comment they had to contact ticketing. This sounds like while you had a reservation, you had no ticket issued yet. Thus since your friend had his ticket issued, he was next in line to upgrade. You don't enter the queue till you're ticketed. Thus it wasn't out of order, it was done exactly how it's supposed to happen. The question in this case is why did it take so long to ticket. Did you buy direct from DL or was it done through a travel agency? If the latter, those frequently aren't ticketed by the agent/agency till later in the day. If DL normally those are done fairly quickly. However if there's an issue then it can be delayed till its worked by someone in ticketing manually.