Ancient Observer wrote;
Then, BA put their customer service in Sin in the hands of Quantas, so real customers who paid real money were always put third to 1. crew who were mates, and then crew who were not mates. Paying customers were not quite actively disliked - it just felt like it.
Quite which scenario are you talking about here? If you are are a fare paying passenger then you will have a boarding priority. Positioning crew may well have a higher priority than you if they are en route to rescue a service that has become unstuck, a very rare circumstance. A fare paying passenger will almost always get priority over positiong crew, unless the commercial pax is 'Standby', once again it comes down to allocated boarding priority.
If you are talking about jump seats well, they are simply not in the public domain so crew will get them under just about any circumstances before a passenger as the airline cannot sell jump seats. With my last employer the jump seats were at captains discretion but, if you didn't have an aviation related ID, you had no hope of getting one.
The only upside was that I did convince my 2 children that "real" planes had upstairs and downstairs. They could wear themselves out running up and down the stairs,
Hope the cabin crew and the rest of the pax in that cabin appreciated this?