Your Call Is Important to Us#

The claim this course keeps testing#

Waiting is not simply the absence of service.

It is one of the ways a system allocates service, risk, attention and priority.

Twelve weeks, one file#

Every week adds one artefact to the same fictional case: the SlopU Office of Everything — a single counter that queues everything the university’s central services touch.

• one ticket system
• one queue
• everything routed through it, from enrolment variations to lost property

That absence is a decision#

The counter has run on first-come-first-served since it opened — not because anyone proved it was the right rule, but because nobody has yet proposed a different one.

Not deciding is still a decision. Week 4 asks whether this one holds up.

Two different claims about a queue#

“A delay happened.” Something went wrong. An accident. Nobody’s fault in particular.

“A waiting rule was designed.” Someone chose an ordering, on purpose, with consequences for who waits and who doesn’t.

This course is about learning to tell these two claims apart.

Fiction, kept honest#

The Office of Everything is invented, built for these exercises. Its memos, ticket logs and incidents are always marked as synthetic case material.

Claims about real queueing systems are kept separate, and kept plain — no invented statistics, studies or laws borrowed to make a point sound more certain than it is.

The shape of the semester#

1. Measure the wait — what it actually looks like, not what an average claims
2. Choose who goes next — and who that choice costs
3. Communicate uncertainty — what a system can honestly promise
4. Defend a waiting system — redesign it, and justify every decision

This week’s Queue Lab#

Observe a public queue, or use an approved accessible observation record.

Separate recorded events from your assumptions. Identify your source.

When did the wait actually begin?