Week 1: When does waiting begin?
Opens the course claim — a queue is a design decision, not an absence of service — and introduces the SlopU Office of Everything as the case the semester returns to.
22 February 2027
Every week of this course adds one artefact to the same file: the SlopU Office of Everything, a single counter that queues everything the university’s central services touch. This lecture sets up why a fictional office is useful at all, and draws the line the course keeps returning to — between “a delay happened” and “a waiting rule was designed.”
Outline#
- the course claim: waiting allocates service, risk, attention and priority — it is not simply the absence of service
- the Office of Everything: one counter, one ticket system, everything from enrolment variations to lost property routed through it
- “a delay happened” (something went wrong) versus “a waiting rule was designed” (someone chose an ordering, on purpose, with consequences)
- what counts as evidence in this course: the Office of Everything is fiction, built for the exercises; claims about real queueing systems are kept separate and kept plain
- the shape of the semester — measure, choose, communicate, defend — and where week 1’s observation exercise fits into it
Office of Everything file — synthetic case material. The counter opened this semester with a single rule printed above the ticket dispenser: “Take a number. Numbers are served in order.” No other policy is recorded yet — that absence is itself a decision, and next week’s session starts by noticing what it doesn’t say.
The Queue Lab this week asks you to watch a real queue — not the Office of Everything’s — closely enough to notice where the “delay happened / rule was designed” line actually falls in something you can see.
Teaching team
- Renata Voss — convenor