The big kernel lock strikes again

I think a better analogy would be a restaurant that gives you a buzzer that alerts you when
your table is ready.

Only in this case, the buzzer is really a pager that works anywhere in the world. So customers
will go home or go run errands while waiting. This causes a lot of latency (tables unoccupied
for huge stretches because the 'next' customer is not close by).

You can solve the problem by not having a long range buzzer (i.e. lock waiting programs in
memory to prevent them from being swapped out -- but this would waste memory, since it could
be hours before the resource is ready, and programs that don't need the resource could use the
extra memory), or you could simply use the buzzer to say "the next table free, if you can't
come quickly we'll give it to someone else and buzz you later".