Originally Posted by ijgordon

And then have them shut the boarding door in your face and tell you the next flight is 2 days later? Which is what happened. So I don't think that's a good summary or necessarily good advice.

There probably wasn't anything the OP could have done to get into J on the original flight, he was effectively between a rock and a hard place given AA's policies and practices. And like I posited earlier in this thread, if his flight was 2 minutes later and he got to the gate after the door had closed, we wouldn't be having any of this discussion.