Life is not fair, neither are lines.
At public events, men quickly file in and out of restrooms, while women develop age spots standing waiting their turn. At fast-food restaurants, patrons who enter first often are served after those who arrive later. On freeways, the daily incidents of what amounts to line jumping are too numerous to contemplate.
In this, the high season of waiting, there may be comfort in knowing that scientists at some of the nation's finest universities diligently study the web of lines that compose the circle of modern life. Broadly known as the science of queuing, researchers in mathematics, physics and psychology strive to ease the widely felt burden of lines and impose some semblance of order and justice upon them. They have their work cut out for them; from grocery stores to congested roadways, estimates are that over a lifetime the average American spends two to three years in line.
The field's main goal isn't necessarily to eliminate but rather to maximize the actual and perceived efficiency of a line. The techniques, employed by both the private and public sector, have saved or earned hundreds of millions of dollars while simultaneously preventing countless complaints. And its applications go far beyond the immediacy of the returns line at Target and extend from telecommunications centers to airport control towers, and most recently to homeland security.
"It's one of the world's most important hidden professions," said Richard Larson, a professor at MIT who has consulted with the U.S. Postal Service, Fortune 500 companies and many others on how to improve service in lines. "Not a lot of people, even other scientists, really know about us."
Seasonal shoppers and gift givers probably don't know about the hidden hand of queuing science either. But it's there. When L.L.Bean was losing customers to busy signals and holds of up to 10 minutes at a time, it was there to increase -- in a cost-efficient manner -- the number of phone lines and employees taking phone orders, especially during the three weeks before Christmas. When United Parcel Service, the world's largest package delivery company, was having problems coordinating its overnight service, it was there to reconfigure routes and schedules for about 160 aircraft and 17,000 destination points for on-time deliveries.
