Week 7 Queue Lab: Design what the wait sign should say

Replace the Office's frozen "estimated wait: 5 minutes" sign with an honest form of words, given only the information the counter actually has.

5 April 2027

This lab does not build an estimator. It asks what an honest sign could say using only the facts the Office’s counter already has to hand.

Before the lab#

Bring your chosen policy and defence from week 6; the sign you design this week has to be honest about whichever policy the Office is actually running.

In the lab#

Open Normal Day in the Queue Policy Lab. Separate what its completed log reveals from what a counter could know when a new ticket arrives. The model knows exact future arrivals and service durations; a real sign cannot assume access to those future facts. Do not turn a final simulated wait into a promise to a person joining now.

Office of Everything file — synthetic case material. The counter can know, at any moment: how many tickets are currently waiting, which policy is in effect (from week 6), and whether the case currently being served has already run longer than a typical case for its category.

List what those three facts do and don’t tell you about how long a new arrival will wait. Then draft the sign’s actual wording for two situations using your week-6 policy: a short queue (two tickets waiting, nothing unusual in progress) and a long one (twelve tickets waiting, the case in progress already overrunning). Your wording does not need a number if a number would be dishonest — a stated range, a plain acknowledgement of uncertainty, or a comparison (“longer than usual today”) are all valid, as long as they are true given what the counter knows.

Write one sentence naming what your wording deliberately refuses to promise (an exact minute count, a guarantee against further delay) and why promising it would be dishonest rather than merely optimistic.

Afterwards#

Keep this sign design for The Honest Queue in week 12. The Policy Trial, due this week, assesses your policy comparison and defence, not this sign. Week 8 asks a related but sharper question: not what a queue can promise while it’s moving, but how anyone can tell when it’s stopped moving altogether.