A waiting number allows an institution to call you without learning who you are.

The system gives you a way to be summoned without being known. Efficient, fair, and entirely impersonal, it lets an institution handle thousands of people by ensuring it does not have to encounter any of them. That is a feature and it is also what makes waiting rooms feel the way they do.

If you work anywhere with numbers, using someone’s name once is a small act with a disproportionate effect. And if you are the number, remember that the impersonality is a property of the process rather than a judgement about you, though it takes effort not to feel it as one.