Ask Lemmy

Does waiting on the phone count? If so, six hours to get someone at the IRS, so they could fix the mistake in 2 minutes.

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.

Line to vote in 2020 Presidential election.

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.

Waiting for my checks from trickle-down economics to roll in.

I thought waiting a line with 30 to 40 people ahead was a nightmare, until I saw the Brits queuing for a mile to see the deceased queen. That day I realized no one can beat the Brits at queuing.

Waited just over a year in the Steam Deck line.

7 hours at the DMV only to get rejected even after checking documents when I arrived because I needed another one.

Never went back to that hellhole office and found another one that took 15 minutes.

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.

I waited in line for 3 hours to ride Avatar Flight of Passage for the first time at Disney.

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.

The first week of lockdowns, line for restaurant workers to get free food from a restaurant before it went bad. Three blocks long.

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.

3 days I think. For a PS3 at launch

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 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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I was a professional line stander in DC for many years. I think the longest wait was probably close to 72 hours.

3 hour long Disneyland line for the log ride splash mountain whatever

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.