do it yourself

a queue

Five hundred people already standing together, and all of them pretending not to be.

Some places are moments. A queue, an interval, a wait for a bus at a festival: a crowd that has already assembled and been given nothing to do, which makes it the cheapest opportunity in any city. You do not have to attract anybody. You have to change the rules of the wait by about ten per cent, and make the next ten minutes impossible to get through alone.

Somewhere else, on a day like the one you are planning. About 500 people stayed and ate.

what it takes

the wait itself: find out where people stand still, and for how long
one rule you have made up, sayable in a single sentence
a way of assigning people at random in public — a wheel, a deck of cards, a bowl of tokens
portions, tickets or parts that only work when two or three people put them together
two or three helpers who know the rule and can explain it while smiling
somewhere five minutes' walk away that nobody is expecting

Borrowed beats bought, every time, and nothing on this list has to match anything else on it. Half of it is not cooking equipment: the chalk, the game, the one light and the spare seat are what turn a place into an evening.

what to do

Find the dead time. Two hours of queue is not a problem to be solved, it is a room with five hundred people in it.
Invent one rule and make it explainable in a sentence. Anything longer and people opt out politely.
Move them. Five minutes' walk to somewhere unexpected breaks up the groups people arrived in, which is the one thing nobody does voluntarily.
Assign at random, in the open. A wheel spun in public is fair in a way no list of names ever looks.
Hand out portions that are incomplete on purpose. Somebody holding a third of a dinner has to talk to two strangers, and does.
Do not explain the point. It becomes obvious at the moment somebody has to ask a stranger for the other two thirds.
Take no money for anything, at any point. Time and a bit of nerve are the whole price.
Let it end early. A rule that has done its work should be dropped before it turns into an event with a programme.

and then

Send us a photograph of the people, not of the food. That is the whole ask — no forms, no affiliation, nothing to join. If you want a hand first, the handbook is the long version of this, and asking us costs nothing.

This page is meant to be passed on. Its address is www.promenoodology.com/do-it-yourself/a-queue.