The queue is the most underrated invention of human civilisation. It has no constitution, no police and no flag. Yet it works, in bakeries and post offices and train stations, simply because people agree that the one who came first should be served first.
That small agreement contains a lot of philosophy. In a queue, nobody is richer than the person ahead of them. Time is the only currency, and everyone has been paid in the same coin. A billionaire waits behind a student, and the student, for once, is first. No other institution is so quietly democratic.
Psychologists have also noticed something curious. People do not mind waiting as much as they mind not understanding the wait. A slow queue that moves is tolerable; a fast queue that does not move is a kind of torture. What matters is visible progress and fairness. The fury at a queue-jumper is not about seconds. It is about justice.
Which brings us to the digital age. The new "virtual queue", where we are told that we are number 4,312, has taken the sociable part away. We cannot see the others. We do not know whether the line is moving or whether someone with a better account has jumped ahead. The invisibility of the line produces a new kind of anger, which has no object and no neighbour.
I am not nostalgic for long waits. But the queue taught us something that the screen has not replaced: that fairness is easier to believe in when you can see it. Perhaps the future of public life will depend on whether we can make our systems as visible and as simple as a line of people with a loaf of bread in mind.
Fiction note: All people, places and events in this text are fictional.