We consider a queue to which only a finite pool of $n$ customers can arrive, at times depending on their service requirement. A customer with stochastic service requirement $S$ arrives to the queue after an exponentially distributed time with mean $S^{-α}$ for some $α\in[0,1]$; so larger service requirements trigger customers to join earlier. This finite-pool queue interpolates between two previously studied cases: $α= 0$ gives the so-called $Δ_{(i)}/G/1$ queue and $α= 1$ is closely related to the exploration process for inhomogeneous random graphs. We consider the asymptotic regime in which the pool size $n$ grows to infinity and establish that the scaled queue-length process converges to a diffusion process with a negative quadratic drift. We leverage this asymptotic result to characterize the head start that is needed to create a long period of activity. We also describe how this first busy period of the queue gives rise to a critically connected random forest.