Lower Wombley Queue Declared Official Sporting Event After 11-Hour Warm-Up
Applicants seeking queue licences have accidentally qualified for the town’s inaugural competitive waiting final.
LOWER WOMBLEY, The queue outside the Municipal Office of Public Sporting Patience became an official athletic event on Tuesday, after people waiting to collect queue licences began overtaking each other without gaining any ground. By Gary Opinions.
The office had opened to hand out permits for orderly recreational queuing. Residents could use them while waiting for imaginary buses, buying invisible concert tickets or arranging themselves around unusually large puddles. Its own queue then became a competitive endurance discipline, which saved everyone the trouble of travelling elsewhere.
At 9.14 in the morning, the first applicant completed a legal lap of the line. The person in front stepped backwards, so he stepped forwards. He ended up exactly where he began, but officials logged it as a personal best. Somebody chalked a scoreboard onto the office wall. Nobody knew whether it tracked waiting time, places gained or sandwiches consumed.
“The line moved forward spiritually while staying several feet from the window.”
That was enough to get serious.
Mavis Quill, 62, took provisional gold after holding her position through three changes in the weather, a ceremonial statement from a nearby lamppost and an attempted reshuffle by Queue Geometry Officer Tuppence Vale. Vale said the line had reached “stationary acceleration”. Participants were moving forward spiritually while still standing several feet from the service window.
“We are seeing excellent form, particularly among those who sigh while looking at the clock,” Vale said through a regulation megaphone shaped like a turnip. “One gentleman has produced a technically perfect shuffle. The judges are still deciding whether his left foot belongs in the queue or in the neighbouring flowerbed.”
The rules soon expanded. The office introduced sprint queues and relay queues, then a mixed-doubles category that caused immediate disagreement. Two people exchanged places while both maintained that nobody had pushed in. A man nearby said his ticket number had waited long enough to grow a small family tree and apply for office space.
By late afternoon, spectators had appeared, along with souvenir programmes and a judge from the International Federation of Things That Take Ages, an invented body headquartered beneath a locked filing cabinet. The final result was postponed after the judges joined the queue to ask where the final was being held. Officials said the answer is still being processed.