So you may have heard about the British obsession with queuing but let me assure you that until you have really experienced the phenomenon, you can never truly understand the madness! There are several important (unwritten) rules for queuing, with various permutations according to the kind of queue and the region.
The best kinds of queues actually happen to be the longest; and not because it is helpful to your blood pressure or health with all those stress hormones being pumped around your body as you realise that you paid for just enough parking for that ‘quick’ trip to the post office and you are now guaranteed to have been targeted by a power-hungry parking warden who obviously has an underhanded deal with the post office people who are getting a cut of the 75 pounds parking fine! Nevertheless, a long queue is the only way to make friends out of the stony-faced British because in a queue, its your queue buddies and you against the world.
Everyone joins the queue with a very un-British optimism, ‘better to join this queue before it gets too long, besides it won’t be that long to wait’. Soon, when you look behind ahead to see that the queue is actually not moving, you move to stage 2. A slight crinkle of the brow and glancing anxiously at your watch. Pretty quickly the early stages are bypassed as you realise that you are never going to get back the next 40 minutes of your life. You progress to shifting your weight from leg to leg to make sure you don’t end up with deep vein thrombosis, (it’s happened – to a friend of a friend of a friend), you roll your eyes and tap your foot impatiently. Your neighbour turns to you and you exchange a frustrated glance; you glance to your other neighbour and all of a sudden people are united by their shared desire to inflict bodily harm on the idiot behind the counter. Soon people are receiving calls from family members worried about their whereabouts and having to share all available tic-tacs or chewing gum to keep blood-sugar levels up. The queue creeps forward and the thinly disguised niceness is superseded by the primeval survival of the fittest instinct. Any sign of weakness is exploited and a look of scorn reserved those who give up short of the goal to get back to their car to avoid a fine.
When at long-last you finally get to the head of the queue, you are rewarded with an extra-special dose of English customer service, just to their special way of saying, ‘thanks for choosing us, you’re a valued customer’; incompetent spotty teenagers who can’t work out how to open the cash register and thickening middle age women who are specifically employed due to their amazing skill of making you simultaneously feel stupid and like you are the biggest inconvenience since MI5 and their report on the lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq! But customer service is a whole new blog!
Happy queuing!
tata for now
babs
