Minding my Q's

There are few things in life that I am more confident about than my ability to pick up the slowest moving queue in any environment - railway bookings, ATM, airline check-in counter....even security check. There is no formula to it - at least none that I am conscious of. I guess I am just a natural.

Over the years, the skill has been honed to near-perfection. When I first stepped into the world of decision-making under uncertainty over which queue will move at which pace, I applied
what seemed to me extreme common sense - pick the shortest one. After all, if the first queue has 5 people and the second has 10, I have a better chance being the 6th person than being the 11th, isn't it? However, life is a cruel teacher, and I did slowly learn that school time / distance arithmetic is not as applicable to real life situations as it seemed then. With my appreciation of Six Sigma principles, I realized that there might be several X factors that influence the output variable Y, in this case, the time taken for me to get it over with.

One of the first changes I made in my strategy was to choose queues with the least number of members of a particular gender. At the risk of being politically incorrect, being branded a MCP, and losing some valuable visitors to my blog, I must confess that I started practising gender discrimination against the fairer sex. This was based on a simple observation that typically
the document of interest to the person on the other side of the counter was safely ensconced in the inner cavity of the wallet inside a hand bag that usually had a complicated operating system - at least for opening it. So while I would be holding the document (bill, ticket, ATM card...) in my hand and almost raising it with the same enthusiasm that the most studious pupil in the class displays when a question is asked to the class at large, the person in front of me would be
spilling every thing from her bag - except the document.

Alas, this strategy just proved to be the old dictum - necessary but not sufficient. Somehow I still managed to end up with the slowest moving queue. Now I started paying attention to the number of units that seemed to require the service - say, the number of luggage pieces at the time of check-in, or the number of shopping bags at the billing counter...you get the idea.
Surely this, when combined with the first avoidance strategy, would be a winner? Alas, no! People may not have any check-in baggage, but they may get very emotional about how their name is spelt on the boarding pass, and insist that it's a Chakraborty with a y and not an i. They may forget their debit card pin number three times in a row...and then create a row. If nothing else, there can always be an urgent request that has to get processed while I stand at the counter and see the queues around me move faster than a Churchgate-Virar fast train.

Basically, life is uncertain, but what is more or less certain is that the queue I stand in moves the slowest. Call it Pankaj's law, if you will, and avoid standing in the same queue as yours truly. It is not as if I have not tried to benefit from my talent. Since I know the queue I stand in will move the slowest, I have tried to change queues myself midway through the waiting. All it has done is confirm the base hypothesis. So Pankaj's law may even be modified to include the following
clause - no matter how many queues do I change, I will still end up with the slowest moving queue.

It is not as if picking the right queue would make me feel like a winner in life, but picking the wrong one does make me feel like a loser. Especially in this bonus and increments season!! Or am I being paranoid?