Journal
The waiting pile is not a queue
Call a stack of enrolment packs a queue and you will start counting fairness that is not there. In the rooms we visit, the pile by the window is often ordered by weight, by the colour of the folder, or by whoever last tidied in a hurry. The oldest pack is not always at the bottom. The newest is not always on top. A yellow sleeve that looks urgent may simply be the leftover stationery from last year.
We learned this in a registry where staff were proud of “working the pile from the left.” The left was the sunny side. Folders on the right, in shadow, waited through a whole round of offers. Nobody had decided this. The light had.
If you want applicants to be taken in the order they arrived, the tray needs a rule that survives a tidy-up. A single date visible on the spine will do more than a speech about fairness. Until that spine exists, we draw the pile as geography, not as a line of people.
That drawing annoys some hosts. It is still the honest one.