The queue is younger than you think, and other notes from the back of the line

There is a footnote I have carried from book to book for years and never found a home for, so I am going to spend it here. It concerns the ordinary business of waiting your turn, which feels as old and as natural as weather, and is in fact one of the more recent things we do.

The thing had to be invented

For most of recorded history, a crowd wanting the same thing did not form a line. It formed a crowd. You got served by being loud, or large, or known to the person behind the counter, or by having someone go in ahead of you who was. The orderly single file, each person accepting that whoever arrived first goes first, is not how people naturally behave when they all want something at once. It is a habit that had to be taught, and the teaching is surprisingly late and surprisingly deliberate.

What seems to have changed it was cities crowding faster than anyone had planned for. When a great many strangers who owe each other nothing have to share the same narrow counter, day after day, the loud-and-large method stops working, because everyone is a stranger and nobody is known to the person behind the counter. A rule had to stand in for the relationships that no longer existed. The line is that rule made visible. It is trust between people who will never meet again, drawn out in a straight shape on the floor.

You can read a place by how it queues

This is the part that keeps me. Once you notice the queue is a made thing, you start to see that every place makes it differently, and that the differences are not small. Some places queue with a scrupulous, almost painful fairness and treat the person who pushes in as a minor criminal. Some places do not queue in the single-file sense at all and manage perfectly well with a different unspoken agreement, a sort of mutual radar about who was here before whom. Neither is more civilised than the other. They are two solutions to the same problem, and the people inside each one find the other baffling.

A queue is a small daily vote on whether we believe the rules apply to us too.

The ticket machine, the one that prints a number and tells you to take a seat, is the same idea carried a step further. It admits, politely, that we cannot quite be trusted to hold the order in our heads, so it holds it for us. I have a certain fondness for it. It is a confession dressed up as a convenience.

What the line costs

A historian is trained to ask what a thing cost, and a queue costs the one thing nobody has ever managed to make more of. The hours a place spends standing in line never show up in any ledger, which is exactly why I find them interesting. They are a tax paid in patience, levied quietly, and we have mostly agreed not to complain about it because the alternative, the loud-and-large counter, served us worse.

So the next time you are in one, shuffling forward by half a step, mildly bored and faintly virtuous, you might consider that you are taking part in one of the quieter triumphs of ordinary life. A room full of strangers has agreed, without a word, to be fair to one another in the smallest possible way. It did not have to be like this. For most of history it was not. Somebody, once, stood still and let the person who came first go first, and the person behind them did the same, and here we all still are, holding the line.

Everyday life is the real history in Scratched on the Walls, where Pompeii is told not by its ending but by the eleven thousand notes, posters and price lists its people left on the walls.