faites-le vous-même

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.

a queue
Ailleurs, un jour comme celui que vous préparez. Environ 500 personnes sont restées et ont mangé.

ce qu’il faut

  • 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

Emprunté vaut toujours mieux qu’acheté, et rien sur cette liste n’a besoin d’aller avec le reste. La moitié n’est pas du matériel de cuisine : la craie, le jeu, la lampe et la chaise en trop sont ce qui transforme un lieu en soirée.

quoi faire

  1. 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.
  2. Invent one rule and make it explainable in a sentence. Anything longer and people opt out politely.
  3. Move them. Five minutes' walk to somewhere unexpected breaks up the groups people arrived in, which is the one thing nobody does voluntarily.
  4. Assign at random, in the open. A wheel spun in public is fair in a way no list of names ever looks.
  5. Hand out portions that are incomplete on purpose. Somebody holding a third of a dinner has to talk to two strangers, and does.
  6. Do not explain the point. It becomes obvious at the moment somebody has to ask a stranger for the other two thirds.
  7. Take no money for anything, at any point. Time and a bit of nerve are the whole price.
  8. Let it end early. A rule that has done its work should be dropped before it turns into an event with a programme.

et ensuite

Envoyez-nous une photographie des gens, pas de la nourriture. C’est tout ce que nous demandons — pas de formulaire, pas d’adhésion, rien à rejoindre. Si vous voulez un coup de main d’abord, le manuel en est la version longue, et nous demander ne coûte rien.

Cette page est faite pour être transmise. Son adresse est www.promenoodology.com/fr/do-it-yourself/a-queue.

contact us@promeNOODologyinfo@promeNOODology.com