SouthWest has just graduated from a crappy boarding procedure to a super-crappy-shitty boarding procedure. Instead of the ass-numbing (because you had to sit on the floor for half an hour before boarding if you wanted a decent seat) yet understandable A, B or C boarding procedure, you now have a number assignment (not a seat assignment mind you). Mine was Group B Position 30. So I had to locate the 8-square foot staging area for B26-30. No I'm not kidding. But wait, there's more. B1-5, 6-10, 11-15 etc. don't exist until A1-5, 6-10, etc. have boarded. Once A is on the plane, they rotate the sign and A staging area becomes B. And the confusion begins again.
Just to make things more fun, they boarded the flights to SJC and to SFO at the exact same time, at gates 11 and 13, for which the gates are about 6 inches apart. For the first time in my life I nearly got on the wrong plane.
The only levity to the situation was the hysterical mass confusion of two Bay Area bound flights trying to make sense of this madness. People were actually yelling to the attendants that "this system sucks" or that "we hate this!".
Someone's gonna get fired over this one.
