This reminded me of several SEA-SAT-SEA mileage runs I did in the months after Alaska started the flights to SAT many years ago. Those flights had low passenger loads and were easy UGs for as low as $79 IIRC.

There was a nice, young gate agent at SAT who handled the boarding process on most of those flights. I chatted with him several times picking up my new boarding pass as he usually processed all the UGs at the gate.

At some point, Mrs the42ndstate and I decided to spend a weekend at SAT. We picked up a couple nice bottles of scotch and needed to check our bags for the departure back to SEA. That nice, young fellow was working the ticket counter, and recognized me and came over apologizing for not having the F lane open. We hadn’t been UG’d yet, but he went ahead and processed the UG list and handed us our new boarding passes.