Queuing (or 'standing in line' for Americans) is time wasted, part of our lives flushed down the toilet. Just like other everyday activities - grocery shopping, teeth brushing and washing-up - queuing is necessary but tedious, hard to take pleasure in.

This is a shame because over a lifetime we spend about four years queuing (hopefully not all in one go). That's more, on average, than we spend shopping, exercising, cooking or driving. What we need is a way of coping with queuing, a distraction of some kind. One answer comes from psychologist Stanley Milgram, famous for his work on obedience in social psychology: study the queue itself. 

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From Psyblog