Past events

Every so often something happens to the entire line at the same moment, and everyone standing in it gets a vote. The vote decides. Nobody can repeat it afterwards.

0: events have come and gone
0: votes counted across all of them
0: people in the line for the busiest one

A 1940 building under a sign reading Department of Motor Vehicles, with a long queue of people down the street — The Department of Motor Vehicles, Los Angeles, 1940. The queue goes down the street and around the corner, as queues do.

What the line decided

Nothing has happened to the whole line yet. When it does, it will be written down here whether anybody liked it or not.

A vote is not a poll.

Whatever wins happens to the queue: the door speeds up, the order changes, somebody is sent to the back. Then it is over and the archive is the only copy.

One vote per place in the line, counted on the server, closed the second the event ends. The only way to get one is to be standing there when it starts.

A door at the bottom of the Idrija mercury mine, opening onto a tunnel. Ten seconds, on a loop, going nowhere.

The next one has no date.

It arrives when it arrives, and it only asks the people who are already waiting.

Take a number

A crowd in hats and fur coats standing in a line in the snow outside the White House, 1909 — A line outside the White House in 1909, for a handshake. People have always been willing to stand for an hour to be told hello.