Standing Line

standing line evokes strong feelings about fairness, about justice. But why now is the time to insert your mouth guards, because we are going into the dark heart of this standing line, a place full of violence, sex, power, struggles, and time under bits. When you're surfing, there is a very distinct queue for the wave. Once you start to learn the rhythms of it, you can see there is a line for the wave, and if you break that or do what's called dropping in on somebody, that can

lead to fist fights. That's Jason Farman when not surfing, he's a psychologist who studies how humans wait. Well, technically, I guess he's still a psychologist. While he was surfing, the wave will break at a particular point, and if you're too far to the left or too far to the right, you won't be able to catch that wave. So people know where that point is, and then the next person in line kind of drifts over to that

exact point. But sometimes somebody's on the wave already, somebody who's new will drop in on that person further down the wave and cause that person to fall off. So there's a very clear hierarchy when it comes to waiting in line for waves. I was next and you have to So then what is that confrontation actually look like? Is it just like are you kidding me? Yeah, I've

been in those kind of encounters before. Where as soon as you start to paddle back out to the waves, there's there's an argument, usually like you broke decorum, you broke the rules, you dropped in on me. I bet that's not the words that are used. No, yeah, it's a little yes, you broke decorum. I'm very disappointed in you. Yeah, no, it doesn't quite sound like that. But can it actually escalate?

I mean, two fists being drowned? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that's not uncommon beach bronzed vegans in hand to hand combat in the warm sands of Paradise. Even surfers like freak out when they think that they've been skipped, which can feel like a disproportionate response because it's not like the ocean is out of waves. There's another one right behind you. Jason has studied weighting behaviors all over the world to see what we're really doing when we're in line.

What's interesting for me is that we all tend to kind of despise waiting. We tend to want to use our time well. But within cultures, what waiting looks like is dramatically different. In Japan, there are very strict rules around waiting. As you approach the Tokyo Metro, there are even little lines that everybody is supposed to line up on, and anybody who breaks those norms it is very frowned upon.

And then you see that in the wake of something like the Tohoku earthquake and the Fukushima crisis, where people queued up for rations of food and water, and the lines would be just tremendously long, but they were very orderly, very single file. There was no disruption to that because culturally, lining up comes with very specific notions of decorum to maintain the cultural identity of the people in Japan. In some Latin countries, a customer entering a shop just calls out, ultimo,

who's last. Then there's no need to stand in line, because everybody has made mental note of their position in the sequence. In Britain, where I'm recording this podcast, the ability to form meat waiting lines is a point of national pride, which I find both endearing and totally bizarre. The author George mccash wrote, an Englishman, even if he's alone, forms an orderly queue of one. In the US, feverish capitalists that we are, we get a special variety of

line standard. The hired gun meet Robert Samuel's who waits in line for a living, queuing on behalf of his clients for Saturday Night Live tickets, Limited edition merged book signings by heavy hitters. I've met Hillary Clinton, I've met Michelle Obama, I've met Bernie Sanders, I've met Jimmy Carter. Yeah, so that that's a cool part. And sometimes if the customer only wants one book and it's two poor persons,

and I score, and I get one for me. So before the pandemic closed Broadway productions, I met with Robert in Manhattan waiting for Hamilton's tickets, and when I texted him to arrange our meeting, I asked for a photos so that I'd be able to recognize him on the street, and he just wrote back, I'll be the first one in line, which seemed like such a total boss move for a professional line water. I asked if his job made him better or worse at waiting in his own

personal lines. If I'm going to wait in line for a customer, yeah, I'm happy. It's cool. I know I got paid for it, But if it's something I had to do for myself, there are times, well, I'll hire my own line to this God. I love that Robert is intimately familiar with all the codified rules of waiting in line and how serious we can get when they're broken.

There was one instance where I was waiting for a pair of Nikes and a bunch of people in front of me decided to put chairs down and leave like maybe fifteen or so chairs in front of me, and it was by myself, and then people came behind me, and they're like other people started arriving and they're asking, uh, what's with the chairs? And Robert says, oh, those people just want to grab food. And the new arrivals asked when, like,

what time do they leave? And I'm being honest, so they left about an hour hour and a half ago. Um I said, oh no, if this, we're not we're not tolerating this. They start clearing the chairs, and I knew when the other group came back that holy hell is going to break out. So I called nine one one and said, please get to this block because all hell's gonna break loose when these other guys come back. And I didn't want to be a part of it. And I knew, I knew what it had the potential

to turn into, which it could have got physical. Robert is essentially a mercenary here, but there is still a code of conduct. Also. The chair stuff, it's it's just not very civilized. Now. That's just being inconsiderate and you're having an inanamant object hold your spot and think you can come back at any time. That's just rude and disrespectful. It doesn't count, and it just goes against the sperrit of line sitting. If there's any you know that makes

any sense. Lines are supposed to work first come, first served, which makes them fundamentally egalitarian. Everyone has to wait their turn no matter who you are, so it isn't just an inconvenience when someone cuts in front of you. It's a moral transgression. In some cases, even hiring a line sitter compose a real problem. Years ago, CNN reported that line sitters, some homeless, were being paid to hold spots

for lobbyists to gain access to congressional hearings. In two thousand fifteen, the Supreme Court of the United States banned lawyers from hiring line sitters to hold spots in the lawyer's only line to hear oral arguments. As surfing psychologist Jason explains, people in power can buy themselves better shorter weights they're is a meme that's been going around It as a picture Beyonce, and it says, why aren't you Beyonce? She has the same twenty four hours you do, um,

and I don't think that's accurate at all. We all do have objectively twenty four hours, but we are often forced to use those hours in very distinct ways. I think about people who have very long commutes to their second job, and time is very different for them. The people in a grocery store line who have to, you know, use food stamps or cash and count coupons. They're using their time at that check outstand very differently than I

have to. I don't know this for sure, but I have the strong suspicion that Beyonce doesn't spend too much time in line. Yeah, exactly. I think if you look at lines in general and think about how people are afforded the ability to skip the line or to reduce the line, you can see some really interesting power disparities going on. Who can afford two board, you know, with pre boarding or platinum atis? And I sometimes do it, and I feel such class skilled, feel so humiliated, right O, God,

do you do it? Can? I ask? No? I don't. I wish I did. No, you don't. I take the overhead compartment, but Jason takes the high road. Social class can effect not just how long we wait, but how much that waiting sucks. Take for example, the research on the waiting rooms in Buenos Aires and in other parts

of South America. Were welfare recipients queue for their benefits, they might talk to somebody to say I'm here to pick up my check, and they'll have them wait in the waiting room, and there's no feedback in the space. You know, at the Department of Motor Vehicles, you take a number and you have a sense of maybe where that number falls in a queue. There's none of that in this space. Not knowing how long the line is or your position in it makes the whole experience worse.

That's why we prefer a progress bar on a computer to that spinning beach ball of death, because uncertainty creates anxiety. There are two few chairs, so people are often standing around, their kids crawling around on the ground. So it's a space where it emphasizes your lack of agency and also emphasizes your position within the society that somebody else is

controlling your time. The way we structure our waiting lines reinforces who is considered unimportant, whose experience really just doesn't matter because they're broke or otherwise powerless. Conversely, the waiting experience can also be designed to elevate the people in line. Here is Dick Larson of m I T, also known as Doctor Q, for his work on queuing theory, describing a top of the line line. There used to be

something called the Manhattan Savings Bank in New York. People would come in over their lunch breaks, which created a big midday rush and a bunch of complaints. So then one of the managers thought, I'm going to hire a concert pianist from am to one thirty pm every day. They hired the concert pianist, the complaints about the delays dropped to zero. Customers were seeing waiting in the lobby after their banking was over until the current musical piece

was completed. And I read in the New York Times that some a guy was arrested for selling tickets five dollars a piece to get into the bank lobby. One particular American company has really delved into both the math and psychology of standing lines. If you visited one of Disney's theme parks, you've probably seen the fruits of their efforts. The imagineers can throw a hell of a line, and here's Dr Q on Disney's Mastery. One example is the Q channel. You never can see the length of the queue.

The line is chunked up into little bite sized segments, so you're not daunted by how long the tucker is. They lined the Q channels with amusements. Don't look now, but here comes Goofy. Be cool, back cool, stay cool, Goofy. That's the law you. They might have a sign out say if the line is out there here, you might expect an hour of delay, but they intentionally pad the times, so forty five minutes later, husband says to the wife, Honey,

we're fifteen minutes ahead of schedule. The lines at Disney are so good that gaggles of kids think they're already on the ride, which reveals the fact that are our real problem with most cues isn't the time we spend waiting. It's the idle boredom. If you're relentlessly entertained, you'll happily spend most of a vacation day standing in line. Let's now take leave of our costumed princesses sweating into their polyester corsets and meet another sort of protagonist, Trader Joe.

Trader Joe's is a grocery chain in the US. I write hard for their crunchy lentil curls. They're known for their store brand organics and the epic lines, like the entire floor plan is sometimes occupied by a single line snaking through every aisle, there is an employee paid to hold a sign on an eight foot poll that reads end of the line. Experts call this a serpentine line. It's long, single file and folds back on itself, and it's actually preferable to the parallel lines you see at

most grocery stores for two reasons. First, a serpentine line ensures first come are first served, whereas with parallel lines you're plagued by that anxiety the other line is moving faster. Second, a serpentine line is good at distributing any delays, so if a register goes down, traffic is simply rerouted to the other stations, as opposed to leaving a single line of stalled out customers boiling with enough grocery rage to air fry their lintil curls and their own cupped hands.

Before doing this podcast, I hated serpentine lines. Entering Trader Joe's I thought, are you kidding me? But now, knowing what I do about queuing theory, I'm like, okay, okay, these guys know what's up. Where's the poll guy at the end of the line thing. Now, let's take this shopping cart underwater. Okay, easy, careful, please, Those are those eggs in there. Some of them are green with red spots.

Others are orange with neon blue stripes. And they've got a bit of an underbyte, so you'll see that their little teeth on the lower jaws sticking up. That's Marry and Wong. She's a behavioral ecologist who studies little tropical fish called gobies. I have colleagues that have told me that they think they're the ugliest official but for me, I just think they're beautiful. For it's like they're so

ugly that they're beautiful. Marian lurks around coral reefs spying on fish for a living, and she's discovered that the social order of the gobies involves a strictly controlled waiting line. I'm British, so I know a lot about queues. We spend a lot of our time in queues, I told you, and these fish do a similar thing. But what they're

queuing for is access to very limited breeding positions. So in their group, breeding is monopolized by just the most dominant male and female, and everyone else in a group is reproductively suppressed. So they're just not allowed to breed, and so what happens is is they're queuing. They're waiting for the dominance to disappear or die, and once that happens, the next largest non breeder will then ascend in that hierarchy to become the new breeder, and everyone else ascends

one rank up. In the realm of the gobies, only the homecoming King and Queen are have in any sex, and every other fish is in a line of succession behind the power couple, waiting for one of them to get eaten by a predator or wander off, or to die, and every fish knows exactly where they are in line.

And Marian and a team No. Two. Because each fish controls its body size to make sure they're a little smaller than the fish in front of them, they essentially diet to make sure they maintain their exact position in queue. So when they first come into a coral, they're just

really tiny babies. They've just spent three weeks in the ocean is larvae, and then they settle into a coral, so they're automatically right at the end of the queue, and gradually, over time they might be able to ascend in rank, and every time they do they grow just incrementally a bit more? So? If I'm rank one and my dominant gets eaten, how long does it take for me to develop into the dominant? You know, behavi really immediately?

Why you will start to notice that the subordinate is just really happy, and they'll just be a little more aggressive. They will keep checking up on their own suborders to make sure that you know they're in their proper place in the coral. They may also start to flirt a little bit with the remaining breeder. If I just got promoted to breeding gobie, what does my flirtation look like with the other dominant? Um? You tend to sort of swim up to them, um and wiggle. Okay, not safe

for work, Let's move on, Family shall, Family Shall. If a goilbie tries to jump the cueue, things can get ugly. They will lock jaws, which we sometimes call mouth fighting, and when they lock the jewels, they are just basically in the throes of a full on brawl. It can last for several minutes, and after that usually they break away and the loser will then get kicked out of the coral. Once it's evicted, it doesn't have much chance.

I'm afraid, so back on land. How does Marian herself respond when someone tries to skip her jaw lock, headlock, matlock. I usually will say something because a lot of the time this kind of negative social behavior goes unchecked, and so that allows for it to continue. We are actually doing, you know, what would be defined as a social service, because we're trying to stop Q jumpers wherever they are.

You sounds like the Batman of lines, aquatic researcher, slash line vigilante Marian Wong The secret of your identity is safe. With this internationally distributed podcast, Marian's gobies can spend the better part of their lives in line, and some people do too. Hello, Hello, Hi, Hey, is this Mr Janosh? This is Brian Janosh wants something very badly and he's prepared to wait a very long time to get it.

Like what's your current position online? I am one hundred and seventeen thousand, two hundred and ten, so only a hundred and seventeen thousand, two hundred nine people in front of him. Brian is in line for Green Bay Packers season tickets. For those of you who don't follow American football, the Green Bay Packers played for the state of Wisconsin, and they are incidentally the arch rivals of my home states team, the Minnesota Vikings. Demand for Packers tickets is insane.

You can call them. The lovely woman who was on the phone with me, I could only assume her name was like Doris Um. I asked her then, how many people are in the line total? She said it's hundred and thirty nine thousand, and I said, okay, so that's what thirty forty years And the first thing she did was laughed. Is that probably longer than that? So I don't know. I mean, like at this point, for reality, it's not so much for me, Like if this happens,

you know, I'll be in my seventies, my eighties. It's sort of like throwing a wish in a well. I feel so wealthy or something. You are more or less at this point thinking as much about your children and the next generation as you are yourself. Do you have kids? No, I don't get on that. If there's anything you know, high on my list of why to procreate and have kids, it's like someone's got to keep my place in line. It is impossible to overstate the length that people will

go to for these tickets. The team doesn't allow people to sell them, and they can only be willed to a spouse or blood relative, which prompted a dude on Craigslist to offer to marry and divorce a ticket holder or to be adapted by one to get the transfer done. There was someone one point in time who offered like money to legally change his name so that he could take some one's tickets. There have been things like that that I've heard about. You know, I'm not a fan

of that. I feel like it's not very Green Bay. It's not very like Packers spirit. You know, we're all in this together, and that attitude is one of like looking out for one another more than it is for you know, jump in your place inline. That sounds a little more like Vikings fan behavior. Not cool, Brad guy, let's back off. Does it feel worth it to stand in this line? Sure? This line is like a way of identification. It's a badge of honor. You know, It's

like I'm happy to be number one. Two. Do you ever wonder like, are those people getting tickets? Are they dying? It's probably a bit of both. There's a little morbidity to uh standing in this line, because you know there's only two ways out of it. We'll check back with Brian every decade or so to see how he's faring, so you know, stay tuned. We all spend a decent share of our lives in line for tacos, at the emergency room for the last train home back from more tacos.

We hold positions in a web of invisible lines too, waiting for an unknown clerk to approve alone or run a background check or grant a marriage license. Lines, with all their potential for foul play and righteous violence, are like tiny, single file republics, self governed temporary sovereignties where we are asked to regard one another equally. Bring a book, but also like bring your best self next time. On Deeply Human, we're investigating symmetry and beauty. Why are we

so attracted to symmetrical faces? Deeply Human is hosted Bydessa Classic Third person Maneuver and as co production of the BBC World Service in American Public Media with iHeartMedia