Sociology
The Micropolitics of Waiting Rooms and Temporal Hierarchies
Quick fact
In many emergency rooms, patients are not seen in order of arrival but by medical urgency—a practice called triage that explicitly creates a temporal hierarchy where the most 'urgent' get care first, even if they arrived last.
Why this is interesting
You've been waiting in line, but someone with a clipboard just walked past everyone. Why do we accept that?