My luck with United e500s

I seem to collect United 500 mile upgrades. My coworker asked me why and I said I’m cursed when I use them and this is what I told her.
If I request to use them over a week in advance bad weather happens, flight 1 gets delayed, and I miss my upgrade on flight 2.

If I request them when I check in the flight gets delayed AND my upgrade does not clear. This makes them very useless to me and I can’t wait for the automatic elite upgrades coming this year.

Just last week I decided to use some e500s because I was taking a redeye. I was #6 on the list with 8 seats remaining. Then eventually I was 3rd on the list and 3 seats remaining, then suddenly only 2 seats remained and I was still #3. I decided it would be better to not look at who was in F so I wouldn’t speculate why I suddenly didn’t make the threshold.

I had a connection after the redeye and the upgrade cleared on that. Then good old Mesa couldn’t get the main door sensor to say the door was closed. After 45 minutes of messing around with the door they let us off (because it was cold in Chicago!). They made us hand around for an hour while they continued to figure out what was wrong. Pretty soon the next flight was coming up so most of us jumped ship onto it. I got the last coach seat available on that flight so I can’t complain with United there, but I was supposed to get home at 10 am and instead got home at 3:30 pm. This really messed up my day since I had calls scheduled at 3 pm.