Two amusing anecdotes related to RDU's check-in, occurring between February and last week.

1. Related to the baggage check cut off time, I thought it was 30 minutes in February and arrived at the Sky Priority line with +40 before departure. The agent tells me that the cut off is 45 min, I don't push it and take my bag (and laptop bag, and ski boots ) through security and gate check. I did look later on delta.com to see whether RDU had a cutoff exception of 45 minutes or more, and it didn't at the time (checked in March). Sounds like the Delta website overlords have rectified the issue and put RDU back on the 45 minute list...Had I known in Feb that RDU wasn't on the list at the time, I would have pushed harder to get my bag checked! Lost a good can of shaving cream in security.

2. Just last weekend - spouse and I were heading to BOS - checked our bags and were pleasantly surprised to receive an upgrade to FC when the agent printed our boarding passes (on thick cardstock, no less!) - somewhat unusual given that I'm a lowly GM these days, but shrugged and headed for the club. I did suspect something might have been amiss with our FC upgrade, as we weren't particularly high on the UG list, nor were there that many seats available. But who am I to argue? Somewhere in the middle of zone 1, we decided to board and as the gate agent scans our tickets, he looks at them and frowns, immediately reaches over to the desk where he had already had our "new" boarding passes printed - back to Comfort+! No matter really, we had the "bulkhead" row on the CRJ and you get a ton of leg room anyway. But, c'mon, who wants an upgrade taken away!? ...in passing as he re-scanned our new boarding passes the gate agent said that the upgrades were processed out of order. Isn't that something the gate agent does anyway and is mostly automated? Why would we have been upgraded out of order? Perhaps the ticket desk agent where we checked our bags moved us by accident?