I originally wrote this article in January 2015 for the Static Showdown. I'm republishing it here since Divshot has shut down.

The modern world is full of queues. There are queues everywhere from supermarkets and airports to web servers and databases. We organize ourselves in queues and we organize our work in queues. Therefore it is useful to understand a little bit about how these things called queues behave.

The problem is that the behavior of queues is actually pretty counterintuitive...