Inside the FlySafair R11 Birthday Sale Queue: We Waited 6 Hours, and Steve Exposed the Truth

The Great R11 Ticket Sale: Lies, Queue-It, and the Triumph of Steve
by Claire, caffeine-fueled conspiracy theorist and part-time bookshop owner

"Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes, and Steve finding a way to expose the truth using Chrome DevTools."

Let Me Set the Scene

It’s 8:59 AM on the morning of the FlySafair R11 Birthday Sale – the South African version of The Hunger Games, but with fewer weapons and more fibre routers. I’m refreshing the page with the jittery hope of someone trying to adopt a puppy online. Paul is already resigned to failure. Zoe (the dog - if you can call her that when she is like a child to me) is snoring in her bed, unaware of the chaos about to unfold.

9:00 AM hits.
And then…
We’re 484,400th in the queue.
That’s right. Four. Hundred. And. Eighty. Four. Thousand.

To quote Steve:

"Did 12% of the entire population of Johannesburg decide to book flights this morning, or is this queue somehow… not random?"

Oh, sweet Steve. Within three minutes he had opened Chrome DevTools, started recording network activity, and located a data packet that literally displayed our queue number. Not only that – it showed our progress as a percentage. That’s not “randomised access.” That’s a queue. A long, soul-sapping, mathematically-verifiable queue.

We even posted a screen-recording video Facebook and on TikTok (because nothing says "I’m a digital vigilante" like uploading a screen recording with Taylor Swift playing in the background).

Steve titled it:
“How to check your queue position in 5 clicks.”
Because of course he did.

And it blew up – probably because everyone thought this year was a lottery, when really, it was a game of musical chairs with 50,000 seats and half a million contestants.

We watched our number crawl forward slowly:
484,400 ➔ 482,000 ➔ 479,512 ➔ 477,823.

It was like watching paint dry… on a glacier… while wearing mittens.

But at least we knew we could fetch the kids, use the loo, and – radical idea – live our lives, instead of becoming hostages to a browser tab.

Meanwhile… in the Real World

One parcel hadn’t moved from the depot in two days, and I was on hold with the courier, vibrating with a sense of injustice. We were mid-escalation (CourierSpeak for “we’ll pretend to care harder”), when the gate buzzer shrieked.

As most of you know: we’re not a walk-in store. We’re a dark store — like the dream version of what Checkers Sixty60 could be if it stopped terrorising us in the pasta aisle. Imagine it: a peaceful shopping experience where plebian civilians like myself could stroll down aisle 8 without being mowed down by scanner-wielding, barcode-beeping Sixty60 pickers elbowing you into the marmalade. That’s us. A chaos-free, customer-absent, ISBN-filing sanctuary.

“Hi!” said the voice over the intercom. “I know you’re online-only, but I’m from Namibia, driving back home today, and I literally took a detour off the highway just to come past you. I’ve got twenty minutes.”

I bolted upright and yelled down the corridor:
“STEVE! FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THINGS LITERARY, LOOK HUMAN!”

Because Paul — being Paul — was already immaculately dressed in a starched button-up shirt and pleated pants, as if preparing for an AGM. But Steve looked like he'd just lost a fight with a JavaScript error and a bag of NikNaks.

We opened the gate. She walked in, radiant and composed, surveyed our chaos, and immediately bought every single Debbie Macomber we had in stock.
All of them. Gone. Just like that.

It was one of the most beautiful twenty-minute visits of my year.

Let’s Talk About Paul 😠

Now. Deep breath.

We need to talk about Paul.

If you read last week’s blog — yes, the one titled “Claire Dies (Briefly) in Bin H3” — then you already know how this part goes.

Spoiler alert: I tripped over the bottom shelf, smacked my forehead on the floor, and blacked out cold in a puddle of coffee while clutching a clipboard like a Victorian ghost with unfinished admin.

Steve panicked.
Zoe perched on my back.
And Paul?
Paul was on the phone with the courier.
Still. On. The. Phone.

Courier Guy: “Maybe Natasha is her receptionist?”
Paul: “It’s a residential address. There is no receptionist.”
Steve (breathless): “Claire’s down! There’s liquid! I think it’s brain!”
Paul: “We don’t know that yet. Focus. Do you have a contact number for Natasha?”

Reader, I nearly left my body.
I floated above the shelves like a caffeine-drenched banshee.
I saw the light.

Did Paul stop what he was doing? No.
Did he check if I was breathing? No.
Did he kneel beside me, cradle my hand, whisper my name? No.
Did he call an ambulance? No.
Did he even bend down to see if I had a pulse? No.

What did he do? He shifted his phone to the other ear and asked the courier if they had a direct number for Natasha.

And then I remembered: no one else knows the Omnisend password.

So yes — ever since that day — I’ve been giving Paul the silent treatment.

It’s been over a week.
I’m fairly confident he hasn’t noticed.

He thinks I’m “in marketing flow” or “building an automation sequence.”
Men. They never notice they’re being punished UNLESS you send them a Google calendar invite entitled "Claire's Silent Treatment" with start and end dates and non-optional attendance.

A Word About Men

Here’s the thing about men — and I say this with love and significant restraint — they genuinely believe they’re helpful while stepping over your unconscious body to finish a courier dispute. They call this “multi-tasking.”

They will build entire PowerPoint presentations about optimising your workflow while you’re in the emergency room from tripping on a Marian Keyes. They don’t do emotional context. They do metrics. You could be actively bleeding out next to them and they’d be nodding earnestly like, “Yes, but how does this affect the average delivery time to Centurion?”

Paul, specifically, would likely run a cost-benefit analysis before deciding whether to call an ambulance or just Google “how to revive wife.” Honestly, it’s impressive. And terrifying.

So I Booked a Flight

Naturally, I retaliated the only way I know how:

I booked a flight to Cape Town. For R11. And I’m going alone.

3PM: Victory (Just Barely)

At 3PM, after six grueling hours, we finally made it in.

There were fewer than 1,000 tickets left, scattered like broken dreams across obscure city pairs and confusing time slots (like Durban to George via Narnia). But somehow — after six hours in the queue — yes, the queue — where our number dropped sequentially downwards from 484,000 by a few hundred every few minutes, where our percentage progress went from 0.00 to eventually 1, we got into Safair. We could see when we were in the last thousand, and we were frantically looking at every day and date where tickets were still available. It was a race right down to the finish line — we were in the last 1,000, but there were far from 1,000 tickets left. Our only hope was that those already inside wouldn’t find and finish their checkout within the allocated 10 minutes and would get booted out — which is what Queue-It does.

By divine grace or Steve’s willpower — we got one.

A return trip. Joburg to Cape Town.

So sometime in June, I’ll be hopping on an R11 flight, raiding Cape Town’s bookstores like a literary Viking, and PUDO’ing the spoils back to Jozi with the ferocity of someone who hasn’t processed her emotions but has excellent taste in fiction.

I already have a route planned: Kalk Bay to Observatory, Long Street to Salt River. If it has secondhand books and a creaky floorboard, I’m going in. I’ll be negotiating like a woman possessed — holding up slightly bent thrillers like they’re sacred relics and whispering, “Half price if I take the whole pile?”

And then I’ll pack them, label them, and PUDO them right back to myself in Johannesburg — because who wants to schlep a 100kgs of books through security when you could ship your feelings home instead?
Emotional support parcels. It’s the future.

Courier Curveball: Kevin Enters

Later that day, I noticed something odd.

Mbusi, our beloved courier, didn’t arrive. Instead, a fresh-faced stranger named Kevin showed up with a polite smile and a manifest.

Now, Mbusi is part of our ecosystem. He’s seen our tears. He’s brought Zoe treats. He knows how to load a parcel van like he’s playing emotional Jenga.

So when Kevin appeared, I panicked.

“Where’s Mbusi? Is he sick? Was he in an accident? Did something happen?”

Kevin, blinking: “Uh… I think… he’s on leave?”

Naturally, I called Mbusi.

He answered mid-chew, laughing.
“Claire, I’m fine. I’m at home. I told Paul.”

OF COURSE YOU DID.
And OF COURSE PAUL NEVER TOLD ME.

(To be fair I also didn't ask and I'm barely talking to him)
And because he was busy.
Still trying to track down Natasha.

In Conclusion

• Was the sale “random” this year? Not even remotely.

• Did Steve prove it using Chrome and a moral compass? Absolutely.

• Did I nearly die while Paul solved logistics crimes? Yes, yes I did.

• Am I holding a grudge? Only until I land in Cape Town.

• Is Kevin okay? I think so. He flinched a little, but he’s adapting.

Epilogue: How Queue-It Actually Works

So let’s demystify the FlySafair queue, shall we? Because while their site claimed "random selection," the truth is a bit more nuanced.

📦 The Two Phases of Queue-It (and Where the ‘Randomness’ Happens)

🔹 1. Pre-Queue (Waiting Room, Before Launch)
Everyone who visits the site before the official start time (say 9:00 AM) is placed in a digital waiting room. Lets say there were 750 000 people logged into the FlySafair website as the clock struck 9. Then, exactly at 9:00 AM, Queue-It assigns them a random queue position — anywhere from 1 to, say, 750,000. That’s it. That’s your big roll of the dice.  So yes, whether you logged on at 4:52am or 8:58am, came 9am you were randomally assigned a queue number - for the rest of the day! We drew 484,000. Which… you know, not ideal, but thanks for playing. That's it - the only moment of randomness the whole day.

🔹 2. Post-Queue (After Launch)
Once 9:01 rolls around, anyone new joining the site is added to the back of the queue, in the order they arrive. No more shuffling. No randomness. Just a digital line stretching into oblivion. Steve confirmed this by joining from two devices at 9:10 and 9:11 — the 9:10 one got number 792,123, the 9:11 got 804,790. Case closed.

So yes — it’s "random" if you’re early. But once the gates open, it’s strictly first-come, first-served. And unless someone ahead of you fails to check out within their 10-minute window (bless their indecisiveness), you’re stuck watching the queue crawl along like a tortoise on dial-up.

At ReadMatter, Nothing Is Random (Except Maybe Claire's Mood Before Coffee)

Here’s the thing: we like fair. We like honest. We don’t shuffle your place in line or make you guess whether that Colleen Hoover paperback will vanish from your cart.

The price you see is the price you pay. The first person to click Buy on that Sarah J. Maas boxset? Gets the Sarah J. Maas boxset. No algorithms, no smoke and mirrors, no needing to decode developer tools just to get the truth.

Just quality books, real people, and transparent service — even when chaos is knocking at the depot door.

ReadMatter. Because in a world full of queues, we believe in first come, fair served.