Well, some theory works in Cyprus

After the Queuing Theory came crashing down in Cyprus, I didn’t expect any other scientific or mathematical model to work in Cyprus. Yet again, the Cypriots proved me wrong. Chaos Theory rules in Cyprus. Yesterday, I started from Cyprus for Dubai. I reached the airport at around 4 pm for a 5.30 pm flight.

Ya, this is normal in Cyprus. You don’t need to be a day earlier in the airport like in India! There were around 6 flights scheduled for departure in that slot of 2-3 hours. So, it was pretty much logical to have 6 counters and hence 6 queues. But, I had forgotten that Queuing Theory doesn’t work in Cyprus. It was Chaos Theory which dominated the scene. Some smart Cyprus Airways official decided that things would speed up if all the 6 counters available catered to all flights rather than one each for a flight. So, it was any queue for any flight or rather any queue for all flights! So, Vidhya and I did our probability and statistical calculation and chose the slowest moving queue.

Half an hour later, after we had moved 1.2 metres forward, another smart cyprus airways official decided that the plan implemented by the other smart Cyprus airways official was getting nowhere and decided to change our queue to one particular flight. It so happened that out of the few dozen people in the queue only 2.5 (2 adults and a kid) belonged to this flight.

So, what happens to the rest of the people?

Chaos theory comes to the rescue. The people in our queue were of the opinion that we should be offered similar positions in other queues whereas people in the other queues, very politely pointed us the way to the end of their queues. Chaos rules !I managed to check-in at 5.25 pm and my flight was supposed to take-off at 5.30 pm. Finally, the situation became like the bus stands back home with the officials yelling out for each flight and people pushing their way through the queues with their trolleys. Even after all this, we managed to take-off at 6.30 pm, a mere one hour late. Hail Europe!