Queuing up is the new normal, especially when it comes to the T.S.A. Fifty minutes, two hours, half a day—how much time is a flight (or a cronut or a ticket to a Harry Styles show) worth? Zach Helfand reports.
At J.F.K. and Newark , passengers wait on line, in our peculiar regional formulation. In Atlanta and New Orleans and pretty much everywhere else, they wait in line, except for the Brits, who queue. Theirs is a country obsessed with hierarchy and one’s place in it; queuing etiquette is basically their citizenship exam.
Americans tend to have less patience. You can track political discontent via inflation and inequality, or you can look at lines: voting lines, vaccine lines, virtual lines for veterans’ benefits. The airport lines have resulted from a government shutdown, our third in six months. T.S.A. agents, who haven’t been fully paid since February 14th, have been calling in sick. There have been digital lines for Social Security checks and for Harry Styles . New Yorkers can pay thirty-two hundred dollars for a studio apartment, but often only after waiting on a long line to tour it. Lines are more insulting, of course, when they’re distributed unequally. PreCheck, first class, CLEAR. Lines reveal whose time is worth more than whose. In Dubai, apparently, the ruling Emiratis get to cut, as do politicians in Thailand. But there’s something egalitarian about an unadulterated line. This is a system that’s un-gameable by algorithm, concierge, or bot. Its rules need no explanation , and violators are treated harshly. In 2006, a guy stabbed an alleged line cheat near a midtown halal cart, and even a prosecutor acknowledged that everyone hates a cutter. “They sneak,” she said. “Is that polite? No. But is it criminal? No.” Vladimir Sorokin, who wrote a novel called “The Queue,” viewed the line as the U.S.S.R.’s defining feature. In a way, the Soviet Union ended not when the wall fell but when the line did. Sorokin wrote, “The line was dispersed and reborn as a crowd.” The queuer’s paradox: passing a line, you want to join it. Biblically speaking, the first line was Noah’s. You wanted to be in that one. We queue for the cronut, Trader Joe’s, Shakespeare, and the Jimmy Choo sample sale. One notices the line at Lucali, but not at Sbarro. “A longer line could signal value,” Jamol Pender, a professor of queuing theory at Cornell, said the other day. Lines are unavoidable , but there are mitigation methods. Airports situate gates far from baggage claim—people don’t mind walking to their bags, but they do mind lining up to wait for them. On a recent afternoon, the line at LaGuardia’s Terminal B was one of the longest in the country. Estimate: twenty-eight minutes. That seemed suspect; it overflowed through the concourse. An amateur queuing theorist waited in front of Muizz Shaikh, a physical therapist from Pune, India, who was heading to a conference in Phoenix, via Denver. India is a country of many lines but different norms. You can talk your way through. “In Pune, we have a savory which we call vada pav,” Shaikh said. “People line up for it, but the service is quick. It’s like five minutes.” His trip so far: Two entry lines in Mumbai. Lines for check-in and boarding. A security line in Dubai, where an Iranian drone had reportedly hit an oil tank, necessitating a stopover to fill up in Jeddah, which had a taxi line to the runway. Shaikh landed at J.F.K. , but his next flight was cancelled. “Thirty-four hours I have been travelling,” he said. “I don’t have any energy left.” The estimated twenty-eight minutes came and went. The travellers weren’t even halfway to the checkpoint. Eyes glazed at the forty-minute mark. A guy with Louis Vuitton luggage and a wad of cash yelled at his family. Nine minutes later, Shaikh chose between three I.D.-screening sub-lines. “I always seem to pick the slower side,” he said. Fifty-five minutes and thirty seconds after joining, he made it through and headed to his gate. There was enough time to linger in the pre-boarding blob line, to enter the official line, and to queue on the jet bridge, before heading to his seat. ♦
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