In 2022, hundreds of pairs of sandals marked people's places in a queue for low-cost cooking oil in Pemalang, Central Java, Indonesia. Local reporting described residents placing footwear along the road from early morning while the owners waited elsewhere, including in the shade.
A sandal is not a numbered ticket. Yet when everyone present accepts that one pair represents one person's turn, the line can survive without requiring bodies to stand in the heat. The scene makes a basic fact about queues unusually visible: their real infrastructure is not the barrier or the object, but shared recognition and memory.