Registry of Existential Status
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Check the current status of a public figure

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Status record

Michael Parkinson TV and radio

QUEUE FOR BAKERY NOW HAS ARMCHAIRS

Is he still interviewing? Constantly.

Existence confidence provisional
A generated photo of an anonymous stranger. It is not the person named.
Michael Parkinson counts out coins at a bus station ticket window in Mexico City, examining each denomination with the intensity of someone waiting for a confession.
Location
Third armchair in a queue behind a narrow hallway, Paris apartment block
Currently
N/A
Last confirmed sighting
Number 14 in a queue for a bakery that closed in 2009
Observations
Can make a queue of eleven people feel like a Saturday night and a pot of tea.

He has taken a job as a professional queue stander for a block of flats in Paris, standing in line on behalf of residents. Within a week, each queue had developed two armchairs facing each other. Nobody remembers bringing them.

"I was just waiting for the post office to open," said Odile, a bus driver, "and he asked me about my first job so gently I told him things I hadn't told my sister. Then he nodded, slowly, and the queue moved on a place."

The local council has received 212 compliments, mostly about the quality of the conversation, and 31 complaints that queues now take four hours because everyone wants to be asked a follow-up. One resident asked that the armchairs be removed from the hallway. Another asked for a second pair.

Guidance for the public

Bring a flask and a good story; do not attempt to skip the line.

Actual status (not satire) Died 16 August 2023, aged 88. Source: Wikidata

E&OE. The Registry accepts no liability for misclassification, temporal displacement or loss of personhood arising from this record. Photographs are computer-generated approximations and almost guaranteed to show a different person entirely.