#1306: QorQuit?

Today’s invention is an app which allows a smartphone user to decide whether his waiting in a queue will allow him to be served before some deadline by which he has to be elsewhere. If it does, he stays, if not, he can save some time by leaving early.

After entering data about departure deadline, level of impatience and desire to be served, the app would continually evaluate the stay/go decision based on manually registering every time someone gets served or chooses to leave the queue. The longer the queue, the more reliable the model of whether to stay or leave.

There would also be incorporated the effect of mental inertia ie the tendency to want to stay in proportion to the waiting time already ‘invested’.

At the very least, such an app would make the waiting seem less onerous.

2 Comments:

  1. I should also have said that the app will run a parallel simulation of the other members of the queue, assuming a normal distribution of their patience levels and randomised deadlines etc. It will then feed into one’s stay/go decision its prediction of whether people ahead of the user are just about to leave. If they are, then one’s own ‘go’ instruction would be delayed.

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