Labs
Twelve weeks of fieldwork: what to bring, what happens in the room, and what leaves it.
The weekly contact hour in this course is a lab rather than a tutorial, because almost everything worth knowing about a queue is only visible from beside it. You will spend these hours counting people, rolling dice, breaking your own schedulers, sorting case cards against the clock, and once, in week 10, boarding a taped-out aircraft cabin four different ways.
Each lab lists what to bring. Most weeks the honest answer is a stopwatch and something to write on.
Lab 1 — Ninety Seconds of Looking
Stand in front of a real queue and write down the rule it is running. Harder than it sounds, and the whole course starts here.
Week 1 · 22 February 2027
Lab 2 — Breaking a Queue on Purpose
Run a queue by hand with dice, then add variance and watch it fall over without adding a single customer.
Week 2 · 1 March 2027
Lab 3 — Census Clinic
Bring your assignment data in progress. We break it, together, before the deadline rather than after.
Week 3 · 8 March 2027
Lab 4 — The Wait Bill
Put a number on the waiting your system produces, three different ways, and then argue about which number you would be willing to publish.
Week 4 · 15 March 2027
Lab 5 — One Line or Six
Run the bank experiment with real humans, and find out why the fairer system is the one people complain about on sight.
Week 5 · 22 March 2027
Lab 6 — Starving the Long Job
Build a scheduler that starves someone, watch it happen, then fix it and measure exactly what the fix cost you.
Week 6 · 29 March 2027
Lab 7 — Triage Under Pressure
Sort forty cases into five categories in ninety seconds each, then find out how you did and where your errors clustered.
Week 7 · 19 April 2027
Lab 8 — Open the Fast Lane
Add a paid lane to a working simulation and measure precisely who pays for it.
Week 8 · 26 April 2027
Lab 9 — Where Did the Wait Go?
Audit a real appointment system's published waiting time and find the boundary it drew to get that number.
Week 9 · 3 May 2027
Lab 10 — Board the Aircraft
Four boarding strategies, one cabin, twenty-four people and a stopwatch. Then the same four in software, and an argument about why the numbers disagree.
Week 10 · 10 May 2027
Lab 11 — Break the Rule
Attack a queueing system from the inside. Find the exploit, cost it, then design the version that survives you.
Week 11 · 17 May 2027
Lab 12 — What Is It For?
Defend your design brief against the room, and answer the one question the whole semester has been building to.
Week 12 · 24 May 2027