The Honest Queue

A full redesign of the SlopU Office of Everything's front counter, defended against normal demand, congestion, uncertainty, failure and cancellation.

Due: 14 May 2027 · Weight: 50%

Purpose#

The Honest Queue is the semester’s redesign. It asks you to specify, in enough detail that someone else could implement it, how the Office of Everything’s front counter should actually work — and to defend every decision in that specification against the case built up since week 1.

The task#

Write a redesign of the Office of Everything’s front counter that specifies, at minimum:

• the ordering policy the counter runs under normal demand, and why, in terms of who it favours and who it disadvantages (building on the Policy Trial)
• what the counter honestly communicates to someone currently waiting, consistent with the honesty standard set in week 7
• the specific evidence that would tell a person waiting that the queue is genuinely stalled rather than merely slow (week 8)
• how the design accounts for people who leave before being served, and what it does differently as a result (week 9)
• a decision on the Priority Lane — keep it, change its verification, or remove it — argued from the week 10 usage audit, not from the lane’s original stated intent alone
• what the redesign predicts would happen under the week 11 worst-day conditions, and whether it claims to prevent that failure or only to soften it

For at least one of these decisions, state the alternative you rejected and your reason for rejecting it.

What you submit#

The defence is written; lab questioning is formative practice, not an additional oral assessment. Submit a single written specification covering all six points above, organised so a reader can find each requirement addressed without hunting for it.

Support the ordering decision with a comparison of the same two rules on Normal Day and System Shock in the Queue Policy Lab, or separately declared and calculated equivalent cases if you propose a custom rule. Identify who benefits, who waits longer, and what the model does not test. The Lab has no cancellation, sign-comprehension or dispenser-failure model; its results cannot verify those parts of your redesign.

Scope boundaries#

This is a specification, not a working system — you are not required to build a simulator, a scheduler, or a functioning wait-time estimator. Every claim about the Office of Everything’s behaviour must be grounded in the synthetic case material already established in earlier weeks or a plainly stated new assumption; do not introduce real-world statistics, studies or named laws to support the design.

Relationship to other work#

The Honest Queue is where the semester’s separate threads — measurement (weeks 1–3), policy choice (weeks 4–6, rehearsed formally in the Policy Trial), and honest communication under uncertainty and failure (weeks 7–11) — have to work together in one specification rather than being demonstrated one at a time. Nothing here introduces a new concept; it asks you to use all of the earlier ones at once, correctly, and to say so when they pull against each other.