iPhones or the Supreme Court -- let them wait, for a price

The deal is done. It’s a growth industry, and perhaps the greatest entry-level job around these days: waiters.

I don’t mean the kind with food trays. I mean the kind who fit the poet John Milton’s sonnet, composed from his blindness, an appeal written more than 300 years ago: “They also serve who only stand and wait.”

Wait in line, holding a place for someone else -- for a price.

Now, this doesn’t always work out. In Pasadena on Friday, when the latest consumer object of desire, the new iPhones, went on sale, the business model failed.

Some wanna-be entrepreneur with euros in his eyes had evidently recruited carloads of the homeless from skid row and shuttled them to Pasadena. In exchange for waiting in line overnight for the Apple store to open, each would get $40, cigarettes and fast food from this clever fellow. They were given vouchers that they were told could be exchanged for iPhones. He apparently had plans to sell those phones overseas for a chunky profit, and the homeless would be recompensed.

It didn’t work. The vouchers didn’t seem to be acceptable as Apple currency, the wheeler-dealer got only a few phones before the store ordered him off the premises, and he refused to pay some of the homeless people he’d recruited. Photos of the brawl show Pasadena police escorting the man off the premises. In his heart of hearts, he may have been relieved to have what amounted to police protection, after he allegedly ripped off the homeless people.

He also had a death-grip on those bags of iPhones. If he’d been arrested, he’d have had plenty of ways to make his one phone call. (Two people were arrested earlier in an iPhone queuing donnybrook.) Perhaps someone can explain here why stiffing people you promised to pay for work is not against the law.

With the economy in the state it’s in, and with not much going for the unskilled, is this the new growth industry? Why not pay for something that even corporate America can’t create: time.

In Washington, lobbyists and lawyers pay people to wait in line as their proxies for choice seats inside the Supreme Court chambers for hearings on hot cases or for crowded congressional hearings on Capitol Hill.

In fact, the nation’s capital has a thriving line-standing stand-in industry, paying $40 or $50 an hour for waiters to tough out the heat, the cold, the boredom and the company of strangers. The line-standing industry lobbied against and defeated a law that would have put them out of business.

I haven’t read of people who wait in line and then scalp their places, but I’m sure it happens, especially for arguments in hot Supreme Court case. It might even happen in airport security lines: What queue-jumping magic isn’t possible with an imminent flight, a sob story and a $50 bill?

Is it undemocratic? Shouldn’t everyone have to wait his or her turn? Or is it the very pith and nature of American capitalism to make a business model of valuing one man’s time over another’s?

Or his life. During the Civil War, a draftee could skip the whole battlefield blood-and-guts thing by paying $300 (about $5,500 today) or by finding someone to take his place, usually by paying off that man. A really determined sub could take the money, put on the uniform and bail out before the minie balls started flying, then go home and repeat the process over and over for anyone willing to pay for a stand-in.

The person of Prince Edward, the only legitimate son of King Henry VIII, was so precious that even when he misbehaved, he didn’t take the licking; another boy, Barnaby Fitzpatrick, a “proxy for correction,” was hired to take the whipping when the future King Edward VI got out of line.

Of course you can’t have a repeat of the free-for-all in Pasadena last week. Waiters should be organized. They should have a hiring hall, where they can wait to be called to wait. Waiters need to have a price list: so much per hour, a sliding scale based on the kind of waiting. Overnight or daytime? A queue on a cold sidewalk or in hot weather? Is it waiting for a product or a place? Is food provided or not?

Here await job prospects for the out-of-work techno generation and not just the homeless. Using some kind of phone patch, the technically adroit and socially sophisticated could be paid to stay on “hold” on the phone for you in that frustrating wait to speak to a real person at the insurance company, the airline, the consumer complaint line -- even to Apple. Then the waiter IMs you to pick up when a live rep finally comes on the other end. And thus someone else has to sit and listen to the dreadful, maddening on-hold music, or the endless, mindless repetitions of a company jingle.

A new iPhone 5C: about $550. Not having to wait in line for a gadget that will be superseded by another gadget in a few months’ time: priceless.

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Follow Patt Morrison on Twitter @pattmlatimes