Skipped him over

I'm watching an episode of Psych (Gus Walks Into A Bank) on the DVD, and something just caught my attention that I didn't notice the first time I saw it.

The bank manager is explaining that he attended to a rich customer before a man who was already there. He says, "Mr Stubbins was in the bank before to get to his safety deposit box, but I skipped him over."

There are two things in that sentence that strike me. First, the use of "before". For me, "he was in the bank before" means "on some previous occasion". I'd have to say "first", or "before him" to get the meaning that it clearly is meant to have.

The other is that for me, "skip over" isn't a phrasal verb. I'd have to say "skipped over him". There are a lot of hits on it, though, even if only about a quarter as many as "skipped over him". Still, for me, "I skipped him over" would mean something like "I moved him from point A to point C, missing the intermediate point B on the way".

Among the hits for "skipped him over" are a number that work that way, in fact:

• The Yanks skipped him over the Dominican Summer League and had him in Low-A Charleston as a teenager
  
• the nuns skipped him over seventh grade.
  
• On orders from Roosevelt, his superior officers skipped him over the rank of full colonel and jumped him instead from lieutenant colonel to brigadier
  
• One of my friends, Les, found a oyster and skipped him over the ocean. "No fair. We could have eaten him." I teased.

Actually, only the oyster one really works for me (though I wouldn't call an oyster "he"), and it's quite different, really; here "over" means "across the surface of"...

Mind, I'm not saying any of these "skip over" constructions are wrong: they're just one step further in the creation of a new verb than I can remember hearing before. The "before" thing, though: outside of such an explicit context I could not have gotten the right meaning.