Distract yourself to pass the time. If you can, embrace the camaraderie of wanting something en masse.
“The queuing delays you experience are a minuscule fraction of your total hours of life, so don’t let them be a major source of anxiety,” says Richard Larson, 77, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has studied queuing for 40 years. Any group of people waiting their turn for a service, wherever they are in physical space, is a queue. Larson came up with mathematical methods for predicting what he calls slips and skips, where a newcomer arrives after you but gets the service first: They skip up, you slip back. Such cutting doesn’t need to be intentional to feel unjust. “If you are the victim, you incur a psychological cost,” Larson says. “You can get angry or even violent.” Make every effort to relax instead.
In the last 15 years or so, Larson has noticed an increasing number of queues that allow people to buy their way into a faster lane. He’s unsure whether that could change the culture of how Americans line up or their proclivity to cut, but it might. A well-designed line makes cheating nearly impossible. Should you find yourself in a vastly more complicated and chaotic one like, say, a queue to get hundreds of millions of people vaccinated for Covid-19, be patient. Don’t try to cut ahead of others just because no one is standing behind you to see it.
While you wait, let yourself be distracted by a book, music or whatever occupies your mind. Sometimes, distraction is built in by designers. “Disney is a queue factory, and yet everyone is happy,” Larson says. If you find yourself growing frustrated in a line, look behind you. Researchers have found that the more people you see, the more likely you are to stay in line and maybe even be pleased with your position.
There is camaraderie in wanting something en masse; consider it a form of community. Sometimes profound human experiences are shared while biding time. Larson recently got his final Covid-19 vaccination at a clinic near his home. Normally, he makes every effort to avoid queues, but he relished this one. Many around him were elderly, some in wheelchairs, some with helpers. There was collective elation on their faces as they waited together, a lightness that only comes when fear begins to lift.
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March 16, 2021 at 04:00PM
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How to Wait in Line - The New York Times
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