Few ever think of it this way but waiting to be served is often a matter of paying for someone else's sins.
Take for example the backlog we have in our court system. Let's say that a particular court has a backlog of cases that is three months long. If the court is hearing cases at about the same rate as they are being filed, the backlog will remain three months, theoretically, forever!
One case is discharged as another is filed, always the back log will be the same.
How in the world did the court get three months behind in the first place? It could have been an extraordinarily long case. Or perhaps the judge was ill for three months. No matter who or what was the original sin, every plaintiff, or customer, to follow will pay again for that original sin by suffering through that same three months wait.
It's not a matter of one person waiting three months. It's every person thereafter who must also wait three months.
This same principle applies to any situation where people must wait. Mess up on one customer and, as long as you are serving customers at the same rate at which they are arriving, every customer who follows must wait all over again.
Anything can set a perpetual wait in motion. Maybe you run out of product for a few minutes. Maybe the power goes out. It could be anything. What you must realize is that as long as customers are being served as fast as they are arriving, it is impossible for a line to form. But, once a line has formed, unless customers can be served at a rate faster than they are arriving, that line will persist forever - original sin!
Imagine that you take your VCR in for repair and are told that it will be three weeks. Do you really think that it will take three whole weeks to fix the thing? If you do, better buy a new one because three weeks of labor charges will far exceed the price of a new one.
The chances are your VCR will be fixed in an hour or two. For the remainder of the three weeks, it will be "standing in line," paying for some original sin too old to be remembered.
Sometime, when the repair shop was first opened, there was no line or wait at all.
"Bring it right in," they would tell their customers by phone. "We'll get right on it. In fact, if you want to wait a few minutes, we can probably fix it right away."
Then Fred, Joe or whomever decided to take a little vacation and, poof, original sin!
POS Point: Do you have customers who are paying for an original sin?
