Bureaucratic Queue Recognized As Sovereign Village After Citizens Farm Carpet Moss
The line for the Department of Administrative Redundancy now features its own postal code, a barter economy, and a thriving agricultural sector.
GREAT SNORINGTON, A queue outside the local Department of Administrative Redundancy has received formal recognition as an independent linear village. It has a postal code, an elected mayor, an amateur dramatic society and a weekly newspaper, printed on the reverse of discarded cafeteria receipts.
It began with people contesting minor garden-shed zoning anomalies. Then the department took its usual view of time. The line now runs through three corridors, past the glass double doors and across the municipal car park, where it bends around the statue of the town founder. Several generations have grown up there, having accepted the linoleum as home.
Life near the front has its advantages. Residents of the first twenty yards, called the Counter Approach Zone, live in a damp little pocket of air created by the heavy breathing of the only clerk on duty. She has been looking through her desk drawers for a working blue pen since late last year. Black ink remains unacceptable, for reasons nobody has managed to establish.
“It is a peaceful life, provided you remember to shuffle forward three inches a quarter.”
Further along, things have settled down. In the Mid Line Territories, people have built homes from stacked clipboards and layers of duplicate forms. Near the faulty water cooler, an agricultural cooperative tends a patch of hydroponic carpet moss and lint berries. The crop is fermented into waiting-room wine. It is said to be strong.
“It is a peaceful life, provided you remember to shuffle forward three inches a quarter,” said Horace Finkelton, a retired turnip polisher who joined the queue to ask about a parking fine and now serves as spiritual leader of the moss farmers. “We have developed a rich oral tradition to pass the time, mostly consisting of reciting the terms and conditions on the back of Form Ninety-Four, subsection C, which governs the proper folding of official correspondence.”
The bureau has approved of the arrangement. A sedentary village presents fewer difficulties than an angry mass of taxpayers. The Chief Inspector of Waiting, who works entirely from inside a hollowed-out filing cabinet, released a muffled statement praising the queue’s architectural integrity and low crime rate. Property tax on clipboard housing will follow shortly.
There has been some friction at the rear. New arrivals keep trying to join the established society and appear unprepared for its economy, which depends on bent paperclips and the small red plastic numbers issued by the ticket machine at the main entrance. Elders of the line regularly explain the value of absolute stillness. The newcomers tend to nod, then ask whether the queue is moving.
The village has made progress, anyway. Children born in the queue now attend a rudimentary school, although the original administrative matter remains untouched. The one working counter still shows ticket number four, called before the current building had been fully constructed. The queue’s newly inaugurated mayor holds ticket number seven thousand and two.