Who put us all in this line?

I stood outside a restaurant last week for about forty minutes. They don't take bookings, which I found out after I'd already decided I was eating there. I was properly hangry.

You've done this. Everyone has. The airport, the GP, the bar, the passport office. We all wait, we all dread it, and none of us ever asks who set it up.

Around minute twenty-five, staring at the back of a stranger's head, it hit me that nobody was running this. There was no member of staff outside. No list. No rope. No tickets. We'd all arrived separately, somehow agreed who was first, and stayed in that order. Nobody checked. Nobody argued. It just… worked.

Then I went home and ruined it by researching queues for three hours.

The queue's only about two hundred years old. Younger than the piano. Before it, if you were poor and needed bread, there was a bell that told you when you could buy before the dealers got in, a scramble at the gate of a big house, knowing somebody, and if none of that worked, a riot. All of them about who you are and who you know. The queue is the first system that doesn't care who you are.

The bit I've told four people since: in 1986 Milgram had people push into 129 real queues to see who'd say something. Nearly three quarters of the complaints came from behind the intruder. The ones in front, who'd lost nothing, said nothing. The stranger behind you is protecting your place in line.

Then I found something even stranger. People pick the longer queue, because when you know nothing a crowd looks like a recommendation. The restaurant doesn't take bookings because me on the pavement, hangry, is worth more to them than my table.

the sign said 20 minutes

a stopwatch said 13

the faded ones are the seven minutes the sign added

Twelve Disney attractions publish their wait times. 1.9 million of them, and 25,906 where someone timed the real wait against the sign above their head. The sign says twenty minutes. It takes thirteen, and it's too high 73.3% of the time. They never got the line down. They got the number wrong in your favour.

A queue is the last place left where nobody is more important than anybody else. Which is probably why we keep selling the front of it.

Read The Queue

One more thing.

Thursday is the biggest thing I've ever made. We're building London. The actual city, SimCity style, street by street, the Thames and Tower Bridge and the lot. It's going in the Hidden Tab, members only, and I'd hate for you to miss it.

st paul’s. one tile of it.

Become a member →

Which queue did you last get stuck in? Hit reply, I read them all.

Akash

the queue · a sheets.works data drop

You’re getting this because you signed up for The Data Drop at sheets.works.
Unsubscribe · All drops