Week 7: The fair queue and the fast queue

Why a queue people believe in outperforms a queue that is merely quicker, and what first in first out is actually protecting.

13 April 2027

Up to now the course has treated a wait as something that happens to one person. A queue is different. It puts you next to other people and gives you something to compare yourself against, and from that point the wait is about the comparison at least as much as the duration.

Larson made the argument that people are angered less by delay than by violation of order. The lecture takes that seriously enough to ask what a queue is for, given that a single line into many servers is usually slower per person than the alternatives and is chosen anyway.