Week 4: Is first come, first served fair?

The Office of Everything's only rule examined on its own terms — what first come, first served actually rewards, and what it costs.

15 March 2027

For three weeks the Office of Everything has run on one printed rule: take a number, numbers are served in order. This lecture stops measuring that rule and starts asking whether it is a good one — the course’s first move from “choose who goes next” rather than “measure the wait.”

Outline#

• first come, first served (FCFS) as a policy, not a default: it is one ordering choice among several, and it was chosen, even if nobody remembers choosing it
• what FCFS rewards: arrival time, and only arrival time — it ignores how long a request will take to serve and how urgent it is
• what “fair” could mean here: equal treatment of arrival order is one kind of fairness; it is not the same as equal treatment of outcomes, and the two can point in different directions
• the case against changing it: FCFS is simple to explain, simple to audit, and hard to game — a real cost of any alternative this course considers from here on
• where this leaves the Office: the front counter serves both a two-minute “collect a form” request and a twenty-minute “dispute a printer credit” request in the same single-file line, on principle

Office of Everything file — synthetic case material. A students’ association complaint, logged this week: “I was ticket 41. The people behind me with quick questions waited as long as I did with a complicated one. Why does a simple case wait behind a complicated one just because it arrived second?”

The Queue Lab asks you to take the complaint seriously on FCFS’s own terms — figure out exactly what it is asking the Office to change, and what that change would cost the people FCFS currently protects.