Some combination of that and I'm guessing a perception that I'm stealing an upgrade from "her" (MAJ based) pax. In this case my companion's waitlisted upgrade had not been cleared despite the fact it clearly should have been; when asking about it I got some long and confusing explanation that involved being shown the MAJ ops center.. I'm still not sure what I was supposedly being told other than "the computer did something different". In the end we had so many favors on that PNR outside of it that I just let it slide rather than complaining to UA.