The line to the grave

Waited around 5 hours for a photo on the iron throne from Game of Thrones. This was between seasons 6 and 7 so before the show was completely assassinated. I called my sister from a town 90 miles away and she got a train over straight away, took over 2 hours but I was still in line by the time she showed up lol. Looking back it was definitely not worth it but I have a cool pic of me dabbing on the throne so it’s something at least.

There was a tech event here and you could try a VR headset inside a general gaming space, so I had to wait 3h outside in the scorching sun just to play 5 minutes of VR to know if I could buy a headset without worrying if it would make me sick.

Queue for first covid shot at 6 Flags in Northern Virginia. It was a car queue, but there must have been 100 cars in front of me.

3 hour long Disneyland line for the log ride splash mountain whatever

I think it was a line for a 4D ride in the Futuroscope near Poitiers, France. Pretty sure I waited something close to 4 hours for a 10 min ride. It was crap.

4ish hours to get into the Catacombs in Paris. Not long by some of the other times mentioned here, but I got sunburnt pretty bad despite being in the shade a lot. Totally worth it though, it was really cool and my dad really wanted to see it

Likely I-90 leaving Seattle over the pass to E Washington. It was a busy weekend and someone had managed to crash in a construction zone so instead of going from four lanes it was going down to one. It added at least three hours to the driver over the pass.

In the grand scheme of long lines, this one isn’t super long, but it’s what I got.

2017, my wife and I took a road trip to Tennessee for the solar eclipse because Nashville was just about the only major city in the path of totality. We were down there for about a week, we didn’t have any particularly solid plans and we’re flying by the seat of our pants, we snagged the last couple of campsites in that part of the state, and pretty much started out every day with googling around for stuff to do in Tennessee.

One day, we decided to take a trip down to the Jack Daniels distillery. We’re both whiskey-drinkers, Jack isn’t our usual thing, but we don’t dislike it either, and figured we might as well check it out while we were in the state. Their distillery isn’t exactly close to Nashville, but we didn’t have anything else going on so we were up for the drive.

Now a lot of people traveled to Tennessee that week who otherwise wouldn’t have ever had a reason to go, I’ve since met a good handful of people who were in or around Nashville at the same time as us for eclipse, so I’m sure this was probably a particularly busy time for JD.

We got there, stood in line for probably about 45 minutes, slowly snaking our way though the little mini museum in their visitor center. We didn’t mind the wait, we took the time to compare the different tours they offered and by the time we got to the front of the line we had made our decision.

Unfortunately we were informed at that time that all of the tours we were interested in taking were sold out, and the only one they had available was one where you don’t get to try any of the whiskey (for those not familiar, they’re actually located in a dry county, so not even like you could just go to a bar down the street and do your own whiskey tasting afterwards)

At no point during the 45 minutes we waited in line did they make any kind of announcement, or put up a sign or anything to let us know those tours were sold out. If they had we probably would have just rolled with it and done the tour that was available, but after standing around for 45 minutes it felt like a bit of a bait and switch to us and we decided to just leave at that point.

I also kind of boycotted JD for a few years after that, which was mostly symbolic because I never really bought Jack anyway. I have lifted my boycott fairly recently though, I decided when they had an add campaign that featured drag queens that I could reward that bit of wokeness, although I still haven’t actually bought any jack.

I was a professional line stander in DC for many years. I think the longest wait was probably close to 72 hours.

Probably not the longest, but the most ridiculous. We have a big free African music festival in our city and there are loads of different food stalls with great food. There was a Kenyan one that my best friend really wanted to go to as she lived in Kenya when she was a kid, and the queue was big which usually means good food. However once we were in the queue we realised the queue was moving really slowly… No matter, it must be worth it when we get there surely… After 45 mins I really wanted to go somewhere else but the sunk cost fallacy and the thought of getting in another queue made me stay… After over an hour we finally get to the front and realise that the reason it’s so slow is because they have the most illogical ordering system that doesn’t make sense, and even the staff seem totally confused. An hour and a half later we finally get our food and it’s ok. Just ok. In a big field full of amazing food we managed to pick the most mediocre one, and stupidly queued along with loads of other stupid queueing people for no good reason except being in a queue.

Tokyo Disney World

4.5 hours to reschedule a cancelled connecting flight, which was then also cancelled and required another 3 hours in line the next morning, after a couple hours sleep on the floor. This was at Seattle airport during the bad holiday delays like 2 years back

Not exactly a long line but super slow. It was for a university examination where we just answered some questions about a project we did through the semester, so it shouldn’t have taken this long. They didn’t have a good place to host this so we were about 100 people waiting in 2 hallways without any chairs. We were split into groups based on our student id number. There was a general disorganization but our group seemed particularly slow. I think my initial time of examination was 6pm. I went second to last in my group and ended up leaving at 9:15. The university officially closes at 9. There were actually people who had assigned times in the morning and had to wait longer so it turns out I wasn’t that unlucky.

Waiting for my checks from trickle-down economics to roll in.