August 16th, 2015: An Afghan National police man conducts the first body check for hundreds of Afghan passport applicants queuing before sunrise, outside Afghanistan's only passport office in the country's capital, Kabul.
On a recent day when there were the usual long lines, only two lonely but smiling applicants had queued up for play tickets.
It recently extended its opening hours to tackle growing demand, but new applicants must still queue early in the morning to be seen.
Today, with some 600,000 patents in the queue, applicants in high-tech areas like software will wait nearly four years before knowing whether their patents have been granted.
"We have a long queue of applicants waiting for their applications to be processed," he said.
Yet still the queue of applicants goes on growing.The public-private schismWhat about America as a whole?
Soon to join the queue of applicants are Andrew Nasonov and Igor Bazilevsky, longtime partners from the Russian city of Voronezh who wearied of threats, harassment and beatings and came to the US in July.
"It works," says a chirpy Ashley Davis in menswear at the spectacular marble-and-glass Cardiff store, new last September 9,0000 applicants for 750 jobs; queues round the block the day it threw open its doors).
According to labour queue theory (Thurow 1975), employers arrange applicants for a vacant position in an imaginary queue and consider the individual with the highest expected productivity.
Gay applicants for marriage licenses will have to join the queue at the city clerk's office in Toronto, which stayed open last Saturday and Sunday, in honor of Gay Pride Week.
For example, the driver who kindly lets you into the lane instead of speeding up, the shopper who waves you in front of their place in the queue because you have less items, the fellow applicant who helps you fill out a form you find really challenging or the stranger who notices your tears in public and gently asks you what's wrong.
