Switzerland Sends NATO a Numbered Ticket and Asks It to Wait

Switzerland has responded to voters’ decision against tightening the country’s neutrality rules by placing NATO in a softly lit reception area outside Bern and issuing it ticket A-384.

The ticket, printed on thick cream stock and placed beside a bowl of wrapped mints, estimates the alliance’s wait time at “between several decades and a moment of genuine consensus.” A wall-mounted monitor will display the current request being handled, which officials said is presently a 1978 inquiry from Belgium asking whether Switzerland could “just be a little more specific.”

The new National Neutrality Reception Centre occupies three floors of a former insurance building and features eight soundproof consultation booths, a coat check, and a small children’s corner containing wooden replicas of every European security arrangement Switzerland has declined to join. Visitors may choose from three service categories: “General Concern,” “Regional Escalation,” and “I Have Been Referred Here by a Larger Alliance.”

Officials said the referendum result made clear that the public preferred the existing system, under which Switzerland can observe major geopolitical developments through an expensive window and respond with a statement that has been reviewed by three cantons, two language teams, and a man named Urs who is authorized to remove exclamation points.

The plan encountered its first complication Tuesday when several NATO representatives reached the counter simultaneously and attempted to explain that their issue was urgent. Reception staff immediately offered them a quiet room, a chamomile infusion, and a laminated card explaining that urgency would be assessed after their parking validation had been stamped by the Department of Nonalignment.

By afternoon, the facility had become so popular that European diplomats began arriving with portable camping chairs. One delegation reportedly tried to take a number for “the future of continental security,” only to be informed that abstract concepts must first complete Form N-11, “Request for Switzerland to Acknowledge That a Thing Is Happening.”

To prevent queue-jumping, Switzerland has installed a second ticket dispenser specifically for nations wishing to complain about the first ticket dispenser. That machine currently displays: “Please wait. Your neutrality is important to us.”