Week 4 Queue Lab: Answer the complaint on FCFS's own terms

Work out exactly what the students' association complaint is asking the Office to change, and who would carry the cost of that change.

15 March 2027

The complaint from this week’s lecture is easy to agree with and hard to act on. This lab asks you to turn “that’s not fair” into a specific proposed rule, and then to price it.

Before the lab#

Reread the students’ association complaint. Notice what it does and doesn’t specify: it objects to the outcome, but it doesn’t say what ordering rule should replace FCFS.

In the lab#

Office of Everything file — synthetic case material. This week’s ticket log again: nine short “collect a form” requests (2 minutes each) and one “dispute a printer credit” request (20 minutes), arriving in the order 1 (dispute), 2 through 10 (forms).

Under the Office’s current FCFS rule, tickets 2 through 10 each wait behind the 20-minute dispute. Propose a specific alternative ordering for this exact log — not a general principle, an ordering you could hand to the person running the counter. State it as a rule someone else could follow without asking you what to do next.

Now check your rule against the case it makes worse: if you moved the short requests ahead of the dispute, work out how much longer ticket 1 now waits, and write one paragraph arguing whether that trade is justified for the Office of Everything specifically — not queues in general.

Afterwards#

Keep your proposed rule. Weeks 5 and 6 will each give you a different alternative to FCFS to test against this same log, and week 6’s Queue Lab compares all of them side by side ahead of the Policy Trial.