Queueing Humor

QUEUEING HUMOR

• Comment from a document on wait time problems in the Canadian health care systems:
  "Special thanks to Heather Sheehy for coining the phrase The Taming of the Queue, which subsequently became the title of this paper and the March 31-April 1 2004 Colloquium on Wait Time Measurement, Monitoring and Management."

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• The Probabilist's Zero-One Laws.
  1. If an bad event has probability 0, then to the unlucky probabilist, it will happen with probability 1.
  2. The lucky probabilist works on deterministic problems.
  (contributed by P. Brill).
  (Additions are welcome.)

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• Q: What do you call that line over there?
  A: A queue.
  Gesundheit!!

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• Q: What do you call a waiting line of little girls' dolls?
  A: A Barbie-queue.

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• Q: What should you call an advice column for queueing theorists?
  A: Q-Tips! (Thank you Percy Brill.)

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• Q: If you had a preemptive priority single server queueing system with seven low priority customers in the system, and if a high priority customer arrived and bumped the low priority customer from service, what name (from a Disney movie) would be appropriate to describe this situation?
  A: No Wait and the Seven Dwarfs!

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• Here's an imitation of a queueing theorist sneezing.
  Ah-AAh-AAAHH-AAAAHHH-QUEUE !!!

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• Q:What Broadway song is about queueing theory?
  
  Give my regards to Broadway.
  Remember me to Herald Square.
  Tell all the gang at 42nd Street
  That I will soon be there.
  Whisper of how I'm yearning
  To mingle with the old time throng
  Give my regards to old Broadway,
  And tell them I'll be there ERLANG!!
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rD9rQrbU-HM

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• Q: Name a queueing person, now retired, who was a long time basketball superstar for the New York Knicks.
  A: Patrick Queueing! (Thank you, Tim Traynor.)

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• Q: What do you call a queue with few customers?
  A: Thin queue.
  You're welcome!

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• We recently took our six year old twin boys to see a live performance based on the popular children's TV show "Blue's Clues" at the Fox Theater in Detroit. The line-up of parents and children waiting to enter stretched around the block. My son told me that the line-up of people should be called "Blue's Queues."

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• Q: What does "queue discipline" mean?
  A: That's what you do to a queue that misbehaves.

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• Q: What would one call a waiting line of unmarried young ladies?
  A: A Miss queue.

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• Q: What would one call a waiting line that had repeated images of me?
  A: an I.Q.

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• Q: Describe a closed Jackson queueing network.
  A: Michael, Tito, Janet, LaToya, Jermaine, and Andrew enter an empty Department of Motor Vehicles office to renew their driving licenses. They are sent from counter to counter...
  (Blame Andrew Ross for this one.)

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• Queueing, Queueing, Queueing

  
  Roses are red.
  Violets are blue.
  I'm getting impatient.
  I'm stuck in this queue. (by Steve Drekic)

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• Queue! Queue! Go away!
  Or I must return another day. (Anonymous, about retrial queues)

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• (poem by Yi Bei Zhang, U. of Windsor)
  
  In the world of Markov Chains
  I have lived in several states
  If you are really a magical system
  Tell me when I can return
  To my homeland, the dreaming place.

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• Bill Becker (of Hitachi Data Systems) sent me the following story:
  I was attending a computer network performance management seminar conducted by none other than Leonard Kleinrock himself. (At the time, I had no idea who he was - this took place around 1985, or so.) He starts out his week-long intensive seminar with the statement: "Life is a queue. You come in, hang around for a bit, get some service, then depart." To which I commented "Is that a closed-loop or open-ended queue?" LK went silent and then proclaimed "That depends on your religious philosophy."

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• The following story was told by Marcel Neuts. A queueing conference was being held in Rome. One of the organizers managed to obtain an audience with the Pope for attendees to the conference. When the Pope met the group, there was an awkward silence, since there was little in common. Then one of the queueing theorists asked the Pope what he thought the queueing discipline was at the gates of heaven. Was it FCFS?
  "No," answered the pope. "It is Least Come, First Served."

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• Overheard while waiting in a long ticket line, from a disgruntled customer who was heading toward the back of the queue.
  "The only thing worse than waiting in line is waiting in the WRONG line!"

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• (taken from another web site)
  A student pushes a loaded shopping cart up to the express checkout lane at a Cambridge, Massachusetts grocery store. The cashier looks at the cart, looks at the student, looks at the "EXPRESS -- EIGHT ITEMS OR LESS" sign, and says to the student, "Are you from Harvard, where they don't know how to count? Or MIT, where they don't know how to read?"

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• When I got married, I started getting mail addressed to M/M Andrew Ross. Did my wife tell them I'm becoming memoryless?
  (Thanks to Andrew Ross for this.)

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• (The following was sent to me from pantechnion@excite.com)
  "I moved to Italy last year. Recently friends from Canada came to visit. It was the height of tourist season but they were determined to see all the historical sights/sites. This, of course, included the famous Leaning Tower in my newly-adopted home town.
  
  The lines were so long that day that it took all afternoon to finally have our turn to ascend that storied edifice. Returning to my apartment that evening, exhausted, they asked me how I could remain so courteous amid the constant jostling of those ever-present throngs.
  
  I replied that, in light of the stunning beauty of this place I now call my home, I don't mind my Pisan queues.
  
  ( How's THAT for a line?! )
  

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• The Conference "CanQueue 2003" was held in Toronto in September, 2003. "CanQueue" refers to Canadian Queueing Conference. While trying to respond to an e-mail about CanQueue, my spellchecker did not recognize the word "CanQueue." It proposed an alternative. The alternative was (drumroll please)
  "CANCUN" !!! Mexico, anyone?

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• From Neil Gunther:
  During a class last November, I was heard to inadvertently utter: "A queue is a line of customers waiting to be severed!"
  (That's the way I type, too.)

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For some other queueing poems, most by Leonard Kleinrock (including Ode to a Queue), click HERE .

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To see Wright's Axioms of Queueing, click on
http://www.uoregon.edu/~wright/queuing3.html

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UNSOLICITED COMMENTS:
"Your web-page is very useful, even if the jokes are atrocious! ;)" Ken Duffy.

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