Previously their queueing system was just a long line of people waiting their turn. Then, some years ago they started offering chairs - a little more comfortable, but the queueing system was basically the same: one's seat determined one's position in the queue, so it was like a big game of Musical Chairs. And finally, about a year ago, SARS started issuing numbers at the reception desk: one could now sit anywhere and simply wait right there until one's number came up. The numbers appear on a screen, but also, a Stephanie Hawking type computer voice reads the numbers aloud.
I had been trying to read a few pages of The Great Disruption, but Stephanie's staccato voice proved too distracting - like a numbers station's siren call. So I decided to make lemonade. For a bit more than an hour I jotted down the time and the new number - with the aim to write exactly this post.
Now that I see the graph, it's a bit disappointing. I was hoping to see points along more lines of different slopes and intercepts than the two segments visible here - which I know both to be from the "INCOME TAX RETURNS" stream. (By the way, why are these things always in all-caps?) There seemed to be multiple virtual queues running simultaneously, each allocating numbers from distinct ranges. Perhaps I just didn't collect enough data - perhaps somebody needs to spend a whole day there. Maybe next time.
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