Notice Regarding Public Queue Impatience

The queue at the passport office began outside the building.

This was a Tuesday. The appointment was for 10:30 AM. The subject arrived at 10:22 AM, which seemed adequate. The queue at 10:22 AM extended to a point the subject could not see the end of.

I.

The subject had spent the previous fourteen months completing most administrative tasks online. Online tasks had a queue too. The online queue was invisible. Progress was communicated through a status bar or an email. The status bar did not require standing. The email arrived when the process was complete. Between submission and arrival, the subject could do other things.

The subject could not do other things in the passport queue.

II.

The line moved in increments of approximately four minutes. At each increment, the subject moved forward one position. One position was about thirty centimeters. Progress was technically measurable.

The subject measured it.

By 11:15 AM, the subject had moved approximately nine meters. The door to the building was eleven meters away. This felt like progress. This was progress. Progress felt different from the status bar.

It was slower. It was visible. The slowness was shared with the twenty-three people behind the subject, who were also watching their progress at the same rate.

III.

The subject noticed the phone. The phone contained applications. The applications were available. For the next twelve minutes the subject occupied both the queue and a different state of attention, reading things without urgency because nothing in the queue required urgency, because the queue would proceed at its own rate regardless.

The phone did not make the queue faster. The phone made the queue more bearable, which is different.

IV.

After clearing entry, the subject sat in an interior waiting area with numbered tickets. Number called: 47. Subject's number: 83. The wait was forty minutes.

The forty minutes were spent in a room with other people who were also waiting. The room had the ambient quality of shared inconvenience, which is its own specific atmosphere, familiar from trains and hospital waiting areas and any place where a group of people have been assembled by necessity rather than preference.

Nobody spoke much. Everyone was on their phone. The phones had different screens. The waiting was identical.

V.

The appointment itself took eleven minutes.

VI.

Social recovery time must be hidden inside the calendar because wanting people and needing rest are treated as opposites. The subject had needed to do this and had done it. The doing of it had taken most of a morning. The most-of-a-morning was not resented. It was simply noted, and filed in the category of things the 2019 version of the subject would not have noticed because the 2019 version of the subject was accustomed to mornings being filled this way.

The event was wanted and often enjoyed, yet recovery from it is treated like a separate appointment. The subject had not expected to need recovery from a passport queue. The subject needed a quiet afternoon.

The afternoon was marked "admin" in the calendar.

It was not admin.