Ugh UA2366 (IAD-CLE) is turning into a literal excrement show.

First aircraft the GA opened the door at D8 to start boarding and got a call to hold boarding "indefinitely" due to maintenance -- never got a clear idea of what the maintenance was but I heard someone whisper "hydraulics" -- went to the club to wait it out once the first 45 minute delay was posted.

Second aircraft (first swap) was to N37287 (3287) which had arrived from Houston 6 hours earlier and was supposed to go to D10 -- but the aircraft already at D10 was taking too long to board so they moved it (and us) to D6. D6 they delayed boarding originally because "too much fuel" and it was going to take around 2 hours to offload 25,000 pounds of excess fuel.

D6 started to turn into a tinderbox of very irritated passengers leading to a GA paging frantically for a supervisor (and I called a supervisor I "know" on my cell to try to get a colleague to the gate) -- supervisor arrived, went down to the aircraft, talked to the crew and reported to the assembled masses that (a) in addition to the fuel issue there was also an "offensive smell" that needed to be remediated, and (b) the offloading of fuel wouldn't begin until dispatch confirmed that there wasn't a third aircraft for us to try.

After much back and forth (and still more yelling and intimated violence than I'm comfortable with in a gate area) it was clarified that the "offensive smell" was the reason we weren't boarding -- if it was just the too much fuel we could start boarding while that was in progress -- but it still, an hour later, hadn't been started ("we're still waiting for them to come from...ummm...where ever they come from") and would still take 2 hours from whenever the process began...and the cleaners thought it would take at least two hours to remediate the smell issue. (How did no one notice the smell issue in the hours it was on the ground?)

In what felt like a hostage negotiation ops/dispatch eventually came up with a third aircraft for us -- N37257 (7257) -- back at our original D8 gate, currently due in from STT as UA1445, estimated in at 8:34pm (~20 minutes from where I currently sit) and UA currently thinks we're going to depart at 9:25 -- which I am both optimistic and have no faith in. Though if it slips much further, we'll cross the 4 hour barrier I'll have no hesitation in pulling the CS trigger.

Edit #1: 9:03ish Finally onboard the third aircraft. Towards the end of the delay 1K pre boarding clump (i.e.the 1Klump) turned into a little carpet picnic with food voucher items being shared and bartered (an orange for some nuggets....)

Edit #2: Made it to CLE just over 3:30 late....