Fairly / The Queue and Other Everyday Systems

Queue jumping and anger out of proportion to the delay

Thirty seconds lost produces a reaction that thirty seconds cannot explain.

Somebody steps in front of you at a counter and you lose perhaps half a minute. The feeling that follows is wildly out of scale with half a minute, and people who notice this in themselves often find it slightly embarrassing. It should not be embarrassing, because the reaction is not really about the time. The queue is a rule everyone in the line has been keeping, at some cost, on the understanding that everyone else is keeping it too. The person who steps in has not taken your thirty seconds. They have taken the thing that made your waiting reasonable.

This explains a detail that pure delay cannot: the anger is felt just as strongly by people further back in the line, who lost nothing at all, and often by people who have already been served. It also explains why an apology usually works and a justification usually does not. An apology restores the rule by conceding it was broken. A justification, however good, says the rule is subject to assessment by whoever wants to skip, and everyone still standing in the line can see immediately what that would mean if it became general.

There is a useful test buried here. If your reaction to a small unfairness is much larger than the loss involved, you are probably responding to a rule being broken rather than to the loss. That is worth knowing in both directions. It tells you the strength of your feeling is not evidence that the harm was great. It also tells you not to dismiss the feeling as an overreaction, because something did happen, and it happened to a rule that a lot of people were quietly upholding at their own expense.