I've been waiting in line to die for the last 43yrs, I'm not in rush, so it's okay.
Back in the before times, I sat in line for 36 hours for front row seats for a David Bowie concert in 1987.
It turned into a street party for the 100 or so people in the line.
The first time I was at Disney Land after they replaced the People Mover Tram in Tomorrow Land with that Crash Test Dummy ride. Waited like 2 and half hours for a 6 minute ride that wasn't even that impressive.
But no. I once got to the DMV an hour before they opened and only just barely got to the counter before they stopped serving people at 5pm.
Probably not the longest, but the most ridiculous. We have a big free African music festival in our city and there are loads of different food stalls with great food. There was a Kenyan one that my best friend really wanted to go to as she lived in Kenya when she was a kid, and the queue was big which usually means good food. However once we were in the queue we realised the queue was moving really slowly... No matter, it must be worth it when we get there surely... After 45 mins I really wanted to go somewhere else but the sunk cost fallacy and the thought of getting in another queue made me stay... After over an hour we finally get to the front and realise that the reason it's so slow is because they have the most illogical ordering system that doesn't make sense, and even the staff seem totally confused. An hour and a half later we finally get our food and it's ok. Just ok. In a big field full of amazing food we managed to pick the most mediocre one, and stupidly queued along with loads of other stupid queueing people for no good reason except being in a queue.
I once waited 3.5 hours for free pancakes at IHOP. I had a shit week and just wanted some free pancakes, but they accidentally crossed my name out before even seating me, so I saw multiple groups arrive after, eat, and leave before my dumbass thought "maybe I should say something."
Also, my phone was dead for the last 2 hours of that.
4ish hours to get into the Catacombs in Paris. Not long by some of the other times mentioned here, but I got sunburnt pretty bad despite being in the shade a lot. Totally worth it though, it was really cool and my dad really wanted to see it
Waited 3 hours for a Harry Potter ride at Universal Studios.
Family used to go to Disney World in Orlando every winter when I was a kid, and we ended up visiting Universal too one of the years. At the time, the Harry Potter section was still new so everyone wanted to check it out. We got in line for the main ride which runs through a giant Hogwarts castle. Every time we thought we had finally made it, the line snaked into a new room and we would all groan. We probably shuffled through rooms for like 2 hours until the line went outside and you could finally see the sheer volume of people ahead of us. Eventually we did make it and I was very excited to finally see what the ride was-!
Turns out the entire thing was just 15 minutes of rocking around on a seat while watching a projected video of some dudes on broomsticks.
I remember the first thing we all joked about afterwards was how much of a let-down the final ride was after all that build-up. Funny enough, today I still only really remember the wait in line and almost nothing about the ride.
This also ended up being the last of our Orlando trips. My mom found out she had cancer around that time and would pass a few years later. Now writing this out, I wonder how she felt back then, spending one of her last remaining moments in this world waiting in line for a silly theme park ride.
For me at least, the entire thing is still a fond memory with family.
Retirement. Queued up for 32 years and still unable to get to it.
I am no longer interested in amusement parks unless I have some kind of fast pass (or it's a slow enough day to not need one). If the line takes 2-3 hours, you only get to ride 3-4 rides in an 8 hour period, and even then only if you don't eat (or eat in line and don't have to wait in line for the food).
These days, the longest line I'm willing to wait in is like 15 minutes.
Traffic. I25 north from Denver. 3 hours from when I realized my fuck-up to the next possible exit thanks to a flatbed truck across all 3 lanes trying to remove a white suv that was somehow high centered perpendicular on the concrete median with no visible damage.
I had to wait in line for 3-4 hours for airport security, for a 40 minute flight.
It might not have been the longest line, but it sure felt like it. It was the first time we used that airport, and every time the line passed a corner I was sure that we would be reaching the end. But no, just more of the line. Winding and winding through the corridors, up and down the escalators. At one point I was almost convinced we were all going in circles :)All day at the emergency room when my ex burned the skin off his palm. This was the very early 1990s and apparently they triaged: Gunshot wounds, then anyone who had insurance and could pay, then everyone else. So it became a much more complicated medical event than it needed to be, and he was in pain the whole time.
I waited for over 12 hours to get a Wii back when it launched. It was pretty fun, but I've never waited like that again since.
4.5 hours to reschedule a cancelled connecting flight, which was then also cancelled and required another 3 hours in line the next morning, after a couple hours sleep on the floor. This was at Seattle airport during the bad holiday delays like 2 years back
One of the rides at Disney World. I honestly don't even remember what ride it was. It clearly wasn't worth the wait lol
Two Christmases ago, I was renting a car. Right after Southwest cancelled approximately a million flights. So there were almost no rental cars. You basically waited in line until one was returned and then the next person would wait, etc. I waited 8 hours for a car. Walkable cities anyone?
I got dragged to a midnight opening of a clockwork orange store opening by my mum when I was a pre teen. We were there from midnight to something like 3/4 in the morning. We then left and went home and went to bed, then went back after daylight occurred and my mum had a look around and realised that she doesn't actually like designer brands anyway. So I got to be a cranky sleep deprived kid with severe ADHD and autistic traits for a 5 minute (at most) look around a shop.
I think it's got to be for some ride at an amusement park, I can't of anywhere else I've willingly waited in line over 3 hours for something.
Probably the Empire State Building. It was about 3 or 4 hours, but instead of one line, it was a series of lines. It was set up so that you think you're done with the line only to be at the end of another line.
Another line I can remember was for a food truck. It was the 4th of July and my city has a food truck fest every year. During the pandemic, there were fewer trucks than normal. Ended up in a line that was like 2 and a half hours only for the food truck to stop sales about 7 or 8 people in front of me. I was hangry after that.
As far as a non physical line, I waited 2 years to get a CPAP. I almost gave up on getting one when it finally happened.
7.5 hours for a covid test during the first outbreak in my city, they tried to tell me they were closed and not seeing more people, that was the only time I Karen's my way into getting my way
In the grand scheme of long lines, this one isn't super long, but it's what I got.
2017, my wife and I took a road trip to Tennessee for the solar eclipse because Nashville was just about the only major city in the path of totality. We were down there for about a week, we didn't have any particularly solid plans and we're flying by the seat of our pants, we snagged the last couple of campsites in that part of the state, and pretty much started out every day with googling around for stuff to do in Tennessee.
One day, we decided to take a trip down to the Jack Daniels distillery. We're both whiskey-drinkers, Jack isn't our usual thing, but we don't dislike it either, and figured we might as well check it out while we were in the state. Their distillery isn't exactly close to Nashville, but we didn't have anything else going on so we were up for the drive.
Now a lot of people traveled to Tennessee that week who otherwise wouldn't have ever had a reason to go, I've since met a good handful of people who were in or around Nashville at the same time as us for eclipse, so I'm sure this was probably a particularly busy time for JD.
We got there, stood in line for probably about 45 minutes, slowly snaking our way though the little mini museum in their visitor center. We didn't mind the wait, we took the time to compare the different tours they offered and by the time we got to the front of the line we had made our decision.
Unfortunately we were informed at that time that all of the tours we were interested in taking were sold out, and the only one they had available was one where you don't get to try any of the whiskey (for those not familiar, they're actually located in a dry county, so not even like you could just go to a bar down the street and do your own whiskey tasting afterwards)
At no point during the 45 minutes we waited in line did they make any kind of announcement, or put up a sign or anything to let us know those tours were sold out. If they had we probably would have just rolled with it and done the tour that was available, but after standing around for 45 minutes it felt like a bit of a bait and switch to us and we decided to just leave at that point.
I also kind of boycotted JD for a few years after that, which was mostly symbolic because I never really bought Jack anyway. I have lifted my boycott fairly recently though, I decided when they had an add campaign that featured drag queens that I could reward that bit of wokeness, although I still haven't actually bought any jack.
3 hours in the middle of the night in a crowded mall.
It was Cataclysm's release night. People were packed in, you had groups of them with laptops huddling together to play while we waited. Eventually the GameStop employees came out and started doing a trivia contest with some WoW-themed tat as rewards.
Getting out of Houston sometime after Ike. It took us something like 6+ hours to make it over to Austin (or it might have been 6 just to get out of Houston; I forget which), most of it just sitting on I-10. This was several days after the hurricane had come and gone.
Edit: and we were already starting from right around where 45 meets I-10; not even eastern Houston.
Not exactly a long line but super slow. It was for a university examination where we just answered some questions about a project we did through the semester, so it shouldn't have taken this long. They didn't have a good place to host this so we were about 100 people waiting in 2 hallways without any chairs. We were split into groups based on our student id number. There was a general disorganization but our group seemed particularly slow. I think my initial time of examination was 6pm. I went second to last in my group and ended up leaving at 9:15. The university officially closes at 9. There were actually people who had assigned times in the morning and had to wait longer so it turns out I wasn't that unlucky.
Likely I-90 leaving Seattle over the pass to E Washington. It was a busy weekend and someone had managed to crash in a construction zone so instead of going from four lanes it was going down to one. It added at least three hours to the driver over the pass.
Back in like 2007? I started a line in front of a best buy to wait for the wii console release it was about a 3 day wait. I was the only one there for the first day, but some other people showed the next day. We had a pretty good time.
3 hour long Disneyland line for the log ride splash mountain whatever
Earlier last year I waited an hour and a half for a restaurant that was supposed to be the best Mexican food in that area, plus one of the very few that served molcajete. Turns out by 'best' they meant subpar, tough, and bland. And they didn't even actually have molcajete. I was pissed over the time wasted I spent standing outside in the sun.
Service Canada. It wasn’t a physically super long line, but the shit people were there for took hours.
I've seen many dipsticks camping in lines for days just to buy a piece of crap phone that didn't even have copy/paste capabilities.
Waited through three showings of the original Star Wars movie at a theater when it first showed. Line wrapped around the building almost twice.
I think it was a line for a 4D ride in the Futuroscope near Poitiers, France. Pretty sure I waited something close to 4 hours for a 10 min ride. It was crap.
A tie between the line to ride the elevator down to the cave at ruby falls and the last time I went through security at the Atlanta airport
I once queued for four hours for Wimbledon tickets. The tennis was good, and it was great to say that I saw some cool matches that year, but any feeling of joy I had was diminished by my aching feet and generally being pissed off about having to queue for something I could watch on TV.
I also queued for about two hours once to get out of Wembley Stadium, because of a tube delay. Anyone that's walked along Wembley Way before will know that getting out (if you need to get to the station) is hell. Nowadays, I park nearby instead, or rent a bike and cycle near a station that isn't fucked.
I know that as a Brit queueing should be in my blood, but I just can't be fucked with any queue that's longer than 4-5 people.
Otakon registration line, probably about 2014. The line wrapped the Baltimore convention center two times.
Waited around 5 hours for a photo on the iron throne from Game of Thrones. This was between seasons 6 and 7 so before the show was completely assassinated. I called my sister from a town 90 miles away and she got a train over straight away, took over 2 hours but I was still in line by the time she showed up lol. Looking back it was definitely not worth it but I have a cool pic of me dabbing on the throne so it's something at least.
There was a lego expo near where I used to live last year, and there was an accident at the stadium in the same city, so they crammed the expo all in a different building, a single nursing-home-sized building. What resulted was a super dense line that was the queue equivalent of a snake eating its tail. I got like three hundred pictures out of it, all on Reddit.
At one point, as is my luck it seems, someone held up the line and caused it to descend into complete reorganization because they brought an emotional support dog and got pissed when half the pictures I took happened to have the dog somewhere in it because they were the next person in the line once I got past the first quarter. The scene they made fizzled out the fun.
US customs circa 2004.
Tokyo Disney World
Queue for first covid shot at 6 Flags in Northern Virginia. It was a car queue, but there must have been 100 cars in front of me.
8 hours in line to apply for a new identity card.
3.5h in line in a very cold Venice to see a Dalí exhibit
I was almost 5 hours in line to get Jim Lee's autograph at Barcelona's comic con.
credit agencies.
listen and navigate useless automated prompt then wait an hour for some crony to inform you that you have no immediate control of your credit due to a system error on their end.Probably Soarin'. Probably the one at EPCOT, though the one at California Adventure felt much longer because I was by myself (
probablyyounger than I should have been).Oh, maybe it was the line for Radiator Springs Racers. I remember that line taking forever and when I wanted to go a second time I ended up going myself in the single riders. (
probablyyounger than I should have been).Actually, the line to get into the goddamn plane for both of those trips tlwas longer than any ride at Disney.
The line to get into the Vatican
Life line.
On a 4.5 hour drive home, I got caught in a full stop on I-55 for 4.5 hours, thus doubling my drive time. I guess there were fatalities and a great deal of vehicular carnage, so I didn't complain about the wait. I knew plenty others were having a far worse day than me.
Your moms room
