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A shared queue for a laundry room's washers and dryers. Student residences often share several washing machines between 100+ people — on weekends there's always a wait. Leave to study or eat, and someone else takes the machine you were counting on. This app cuts down waiting time and the communicating cost of using a shared facility. The system registers information and coordinates the queue status of multiple users, resolving conflicts like a user being late or not collecting their clothes, and helps you find a newly freed machine. All a user needs is a phone to queue, making doing laundry lighter and dorm management easier.
The real cost is that leaving costs you your turn, so you don't leave. David Maister's classic paper on waiting opens with the finding behind this: occupied time feels shorter than unoccupied time, and an uncertain wait is worse than a long one with a known end. Standing in a laundry room with nothing to do, not knowing which machine or when, is close to the worst shape of waiting Maister describes. Disney's original FastPass solved exactly this on a bigger stage: instead of a physical line, a guest got back a scheduled time window and was free to go ride something else until it came. That's the precedent this app's claim window comes from directly — reserve, then leave, and come back for a slot, not a line.
What makes it safe to actually leave is Weiser and Brown's idea of calm technology: good technology sits at the edge of attention and only calls you to the center when something genuinely needs you. That's the queue's job once you've reserved — watching the room so you don't have to, and pulling you back in at exactly two moments (one person ahead of you; your turn), never before.
No accounts, no names, no chat. Calm technology's whole point is letting the room recede to the edge of your attention; a feature that asks you to check messages or keep a profile pulls you back to the center for no reason the laundry itself gives. A room number is the one thing the queue needs to tell people apart — nothing else is asked for, and nothing else is kept.
A claim, start, or cancel reaches every open page within a second, no reload needed.
Miss your claim window and you move back one place, swapped with
whoever's next, not ejected — both told why, until dismissed. A machine
freed early with nobody queued goes to whoever's waited longest elsewhere
for whom it's genuinely earlier; 10 minutes to claim it, or it moves on
while your own place holds. docs/adr/0005
says why, against crit 8's blunter rule.
spec/ checks what's mechanical: a machine never has two active claims
at once; a queue position only moves forward except through the
documented miss-your-window rule; identity has to be a bare room number,
anything else rejected; a room holds at most two active reservations per
machine type. Whether standing in the room actually feels relieved, and
whether the windows are long enough to be fair without inviting idling,
is for whoever uses the room to judge.