Perhaps you, like me, were thrown because the first line is actually wrong. "The SFO airport gate" is actually "one of the gates at SFO", which is to say, it's a gate in San Francisco Airport. The better phrasing would be "gate for SFO".

With that change, the first sentence lands perfectly for me (at least as far as I can tell). A single word can make or break the whole thing. Jokes are interesting like that.

I’m right there with you. Perhaps I’m extra dense because Florida.