We get support from UC Davis, a globally ranked university, working to solve the world's most pressing problems in food, energy, health, education, and the environment.

UC Davis researchers collaborate and innovate in California and around the globe to find transformational solutions.

It's all part of the university's mission to promote quality of life for all living things.

Find out more at 21stCentury.ucdavis.edu

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

In the US, they're called lines in Canada. They're called lineups sometimes.

And I was once interviewed live on Canadian National Radio and they started talking about lineups and we had a conversation about police for five minutes until I realized what they were talking about.

But pretty much everywhere else it's known as a queue.

I like queue the best. Yeah, me too.

That's Benjamin Walker. He's obsessed with queues. He keeps sending me emails with links to YouTube videos of queues you have.

Psychology students filming their surreptitious queue experiments. You have Asian road rage videos. You've got people filming fights that break out in queues.

Unless you're going to physically remove me, nothing's going to happen.

So understand that I'm not getting out of this. Understand. Then I'm going to stop at the end.

I like to call YouTube the queue hole. And when I found this lecture by Dr. Queue, I immediately made an appointment to go and see him.

I'm Dick Larson. I'm a professor at MIT. And I guess my nickname is Dr. Queue.

Dick Larson is a queue theorist. Just about every day we experience queuing in some aspect of our lives.

Dick Larson studies the mathematical and psychological models of queuing systems.

Unfortunately, oftentimes too many queues on a day-to-day basis.

Dr. Queue is able to put his professional knowledge to work everywhere he goes.

I have my own ways through supermarkets, particularly if you have to go to the Delay counter and get a number.

You run to the Delay counter as soon as you go into the supermarket, get your number, and then you start walking around and doing the regular shopping.

And you watch how the numbers go drop down. And then as soon as it gets close to yours, then you go back.

...