I am just curious if the buddy goes ahead of non-company non-revs? On SAS the employees and dependents book in R class whereas the others fall under N class, IIRC. Not sure if these booking codes are common with other airlines.

Also, in the past SAS all normal non-rev travel was in Y.

Guessing that there are 40,000 UA employees then there are 1 million non-employee non-rev segments handed out per year. That's quite a lot......