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When we hear that, nobody could love a queue. There's even a dystopian science fiction story about a world where people spend their entire lives trapped inside a queue.
Yet we are surrounded by queues that occur in unexpected places.
As you might guess from the opening, this column is an example. Unless you skim-read, letters and words arrive in a stream, front-to-back.
Meanwhile, your breakfast is waiting to be digested in a more disorderly queue in your gut.
There are many other queues in nature, such as the eggs in an ovipositor or fluids trickling through a capillary.
They occur in technology when you browse the web. The data streaming into your phone gets jumbled along its journey to be reassembled into a tidy queue for processing.
All these are necessary queues, but the ones we loathe are on the phone or lining up at a counter. Still, these are an attempt to efficiently manage access to a service.
From a customer's point of view, it's about being served quickly. It's also about equal opportunity, which is why we dislike queue-jumpers.
To a business, queues are a balance of cost with customer (dis)satisfaction. Here, they use a few tricks such as priority and special-need queues.
In the drive to efficiency, factories take it to the next level. To keep products churning out at the highest possible rate, they manage multiple supply chains and a host of internal queues.
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They need to keep the factory rolling when a production line pauses. They do this while juggling cost against quality and reliability.
Japanese companies learned this in a devastating way when an earthquake ravaged the city of Kobe in January 1995. Using the Kanban method of just-in-time manufacturing, they'd trimmed stock to a minimum. With nothing in reserve, they faced disaster when their supply lines were interrupted.
Understanding how queues behave and how to get the best out of them can be done with a sophisticated branch of mathematics called queuing theory.
To learn how that works, you'll need to read the advanced edition of Ask Fuzzy. If you do, you'll need to get in line because demand is hot.
PS: There may be an Ig Nobel award for a method that identifies people from Britain. According to this hypothesis, a group of British people will spontaneously form a queue.
The Fuzzy Logic Science Show is at 11am Sundays on 2xx 98.3FM.
Send your questions to AskFuzzy@Zoho.com; Podcast: FuzzyLogicOn2xx.Podbean.com
