Comment by shermantanktop
3 days ago
> The IRS, for a time, would cut off your call if their wait system was too busy. That's a critical system in kafkaesque hellscape.
No, that’s Little’s Law at work. With bounded parallelism and other queue values fixed, and a fixed average dequeue rate, the queue cannot accept infinite enqueued tasks.
So it pushes upstream to the next work pool, which is the humans who want in. You are mad, you call the next day, eventually you get in.
Is it fair? Fairness in queuing systems isn’t simple.
It can be two things. This is a necessary aspect of a queuing system when the queues grow large. It’s also a system that many people are legally mandated to interact with that isn’t given enough resources to handle the volume in a timely fashion.