Forty Minutes in the Waiting Line, Two Hours Gone

Government offices run on numbered tickets and grim patience, and I had settled into both. My ticket said B247. The screen said B203. I found a seat in the long municipal hall, under the strip lights, among the other resigned souls, and I waited, and I watched the numbers climb the way you watch paint, and it took, by my honest reckoning and the growing ache in my back, about forty minutes to crawl from 203 to my 247.

The screen pinged B247. Desk 4. I got up, walked the length of the hall — and the hall was empty. The seats I'd been sitting among were empty. The desks were dark, unstaffed, the shutters half down. The clock over the desks said twenty past five. The office closes at three.

A security guard was doing a slow loop with a torch, and he startled when he saw me, actually stepped back. He wanted to know how I'd got in, because the doors had been locked since three, and he'd been in this hall, on and off, the whole afternoon, and it had been empty since the last clerk left, and no, there had been no queue, no numbered tickets, no crowd of the resigned, no me, until I appeared walking toward desk 4 at twenty past five as if summoned by a screen that had been switched off two hours before.

I showed him my ticket. B247. He looked at it and looked at me and his face did something I've thought about a lot since — a sort of tired recognition, a man deciding not to have this conversation. He'd 'had this before,' he said, once, not meeting my eye, and then he unlocked a side door and more or less encouraged me out into a car park where the light was wrong for the time my body insisted it was.

Forty minutes I sat in that queue. I felt every one of them. And the building had been dark and locked and empty around me for two hours while I waited, patiently, under lights that were off, for a number that was called by a system that had been powered down, watched over by a guard who saw an empty hall.

My passport, incidentally, came in the post the following week, correctly processed, from an appointment the office has no record of me attending. I don't know who served me at desk 4. I've decided I don't want to.