Week 1 Queue Lab: Watch a queue

A close observation exercise on a real waiting system, kept separate from any assumption about why it works the way it does.

22 February 2027

The first Queue Lab has no simulator, no dataset and no spreadsheet. It has one job: pick a real waiting system you can watch again over the next two weeks, and watch it once, carefully, before you have any theory about it.

Before the lab#

If in-person observation is not accessible, arrange an approved written observation record or log with the convenor under the accessibility policy. Use that record for the same analysis and identify its source; do not claim you personally observed it. This option also applies to weeks 2–3 and the Queue Autopsy.

Pick a system you can plausibly observe three times across the next three weeks — the same café queue, the same pharmacy counter, the same help desk. It needs to be public to watch (see the policies page on observing public systems without collecting anyone’s personal data) and it needs to actually have a queue, not just a single server with occasional customers.

In the lab#

Watch your chosen system for at least fifteen minutes. Write down two separate columns: what you observed (a person arrived, a person left a counter, a person walked away) and what you assumed (that arrival order is service order, that the person who left the counter was “done,” that the person who walked away gave up rather than finished). Most first attempts at this collapse the two columns into one without noticing.

Then answer the lecture’s question for your system specifically: does the wait begin when someone joins a physical line, when they take a ticket, when they notice the queue exists, or somewhere else? Different systems will answer this differently, and the answer changes what “wait time” would even mean if you tried to measure it.

Afterwards#

Keep your notes. Week 2 asks you to start counting; week 3 asks how much your longest recorded wait changes a summary. All three feed the Queue Autopsy, due at the end of week 3, which is this same system, written up properly.