You know you should be first in the queue. It’s not fair, is it? All these other people, slow, sluggish, goddamnit, ugly as well...they don’t count. And you’re in a hurry, too. Well...it’s your time, anyway. You want to go home / go and eat your lunch / catch the bus / avoid the traffic / see Hollyoaks. This is your life they’re wasting.
If these thoughts are universal, is it any wonder that queuing is a blood-boiler?
You could argue that there as many queuing techniques as there are pensioners in an Asda on Giro day, but I’ve attempted to group the categories loosely.
Feel free to comment and add your own.
Courtesy
Rare. Possibly only found in Hatfield, Herts, UK, when I’m having a good day.
Feigned Ignorance
The general queuing technique of choice for the general public. Simply pretend those other people aren’t there! They don’t exist! Woohoo! Problem solved. The other people in the queue only swim into focus if they’re taking an especially long time or they’re embarrassing the young checkout person (see below).
Actual Ignorance
You can spot these a mile off. They swan to the front of any easy-access queue, oblivious, push in without engaging any brain cells, announce, ‘that woman has a funny nose!’ in a loud voice, or, without any shopping at all, ask the confused checkout person for three quarters of a pound of stilton. Please consult any good undergraduate psychology textbook on how to deal with these people.
Parallel Queuing
Maybe you and the PQ-er arrived at about the same time, maybe they’re Actually Ignorant, or a social climber...you just don’t know. What you do know is that they appear to be in the queue in exactly the same place or level as you, and you are both shifting from one foot to the other, sliding toes forward and, at the same time deliberately ignoring each other. You are, in the queuing lexicon, jockeying blind. This is the cold war of queuing. Suddenly the place in the queue becomes something worth competing over. At any point, standing to one side and gesturing the other person forward is admitting defeat...or to end it, one of you will have jockeyed, blind or with acknowledgement of the other person’s existence, into a winning position. No known Parallel Queuing battle has needed to be resolved at the checkout. Not in this country, anyway. We’re just too weak.
Communist Queuing
This is where, in a situation with numerous checkouts, spontaneously and without any external organisation or stimulus, a single queue emerges to serve all the paying points. They are the most sensible and non-violent answer to the problem that brought about the invention of the queue in the first place. They are the neo-queue. They are always quicker and better, unless organised by the place attempting to serve people quicker and better, such as banks or post offices, where they only serve to keep the customers from wandering off and pinching leaflets they don’t really need.
New Queues
The ultimate queuing satisfaction. Your own queue. Sometimes started by Actually Ignorant people coming into a situation of Communist Queuing, or by persistent Parallel Queuing in a Communist Queuing situation. Usually, by some miracle, a new till may open up, without any active decision by the shop, at a busy time. In this situation, all tactics can be and are applied in a very short space of time, by multiple queuers bearing down on a fourteen year-old trainee wearing a plastic smile that she learnt how to do in induction, failing to hide the fear underneath.
There can be no feigned igorance in the formation of a new queue. You acknowledge the existence of the other queuers, because you’re racing them to the next place. Simultaneous arrival may see the assumption of Feigned Ignorance in conjunction with Jockeying Blind, usually resolved quickly in the white heat of the new queue.
In queuing, it is always worth it. You’re fighting for your life. Admittedly very small bits of your life, say, the difference between finishing your lunch five minutes earlier, or seeing the last scene with the fit one in Hollyoaks. Never give up. Don’t give those bastards an inch. Unless it’s me, of course, in which case, I don’t care where we are, or how long you’ve been there, I was there first.
Okay?
Spreading the Knowledge-
Read on for Readers' Suggested Queues:
Greenhamster of Withering-on-the-Wye, writes:
The Potential Queue
Although never actually seen or participated in, a potential queue appears spontaneously in a British person's head when planning to do almost everything. Most often found when preparing for a long journey or when moving from a bar to a nightclub, we delay these activities for hours by convincing ourselves that 'the traffics gonna be hell' or 'the line will be really long'. Although the line has no basis in reality and only exists in one persons mind, it still seems to grow, shrink and generally follow the same rules as a real queue.
Note: No matter how long you wait in a potential queue, it is never as long as it's real life equivalent by the time you've decided to join it.
Jane of Fair Mancunia Town, suggested:
The Mancunian-style Transport 'Queue'
A free-form queue, built up through a fragile observance of the order of arrival of potential passengers, who may be spread out in no particular order or structure. Everyone will observe their position with respect to everyone else waiting...'I arrived before them,'...'they've only just got here'...and so on.
The only regular formation may be a propensity to group amorphously around the likely location of the door(s) where the train/tram/bus is anticipated to stop. When the mode of transport finally arrives, all hierarchy is instantly foresworn by all participants, and what is known as a bundle forms.
Bundling is a young person's game, often causing bone fracture, hernias, traumatic episodes, and extremely long waits for empty buses in old people.
Gary of Dunstable-under-Lyme, identified another type of queuer:
The Pouncer
The pouncer hangs on the fringes of an organised queue, using confusion techniques in order to advance themselves in the queue order. If they had joined the queue in the beginning, they would be quite close to the front. Lingering instead on the sidelines, with no set place, other queuers identify the proto-Pouncer as being there for a while.
Upon the arrival of a bus or tram, the Pouncer...pounces, leaping into the fray well ahead of the position they would have held. Latecomers respect this, knowing the Pouncer as a long-term waiter. Early birds resent it, but are powerless to intervene through being polite.
PB Curtis, of a cartwheel on a pole in the middle of the Lanarkshire desert, writes:
The Student Queue
The revolutionary spirit of 1968 lives on as students seize the streets! Well, they form a large circle around the cash machine - to HELL with your patriarchal "lines", to HELL we say! - completely blocking the pavement.
George A Romero's Queue Of The Dead
How I wish I had 10 items or less. Or that that woman's chicken breasts would scan and didn't require a price check. Or that she had 100 items or less. Not that I have anything better to do, which at least might give me a reason to be agitated. I shuffle, but I don't move. I lean on my trolley, and sway from side to side. My head lolls, and I enter the Q-Hole. I don't even notice that it is my turn when it comes, and bag my groceries without thinking. I can stay in the Q-Hole until I get home, and only then notice that I have once more forgotten to buy kitchen foil.
Mikey Mikey Mike Mike, of Tumbling Down The Wells, writes;
Parallel Queuer? No Problem!
"I'm sorry - were you here first?" - in a loud, clear, scrupulously polite, edge-free tone of voice, accompanied by a broad, sweeping hand gesture.
It usually makes them feel about that high. They'll either decline your offer and fall in meekly behind you, or else they'll accept your offer, and feel guilty and ashamed for the rest of the queue.
Either way, you've got to admit, you've won. Fantastic.
Keep 'em coming, hmm?
Ohh you are so wrong.
I was there first... don't you people get it? Now get outta my damn road, I'm in a hurry!
Damnit, your post was funnier.
*pout*
No Gordon.
You fail to understand. You shall be held up for fifteen minutes by a tiny little grandmother attempting to pay for a bottle of gin with milk coupons.
It is your destiny.
*ducks*
All very true!
Can I also add the Mancunian bus/train queue. Here there is no discernible queue at all, just a big crush to get to the doors first and a survival of the fittest situation. Old people don't stand a chance.
My contribution...
The Potential Queue
Although never actually seen or participated in, a potential queue appears spontaneously in a British person's head when planning to do almost everything. Most often found when preparing for a long journey or when moving from a bar to a nightclub, we delay these activities for hours by convincing ourselves that 'the traffics gonna be hell' or 'the line will be really long'. Althought the line has no basis in reality and only exists in one persons mind, it still seems to grow, shrink and generally follow the same rules as a real queue.
Note: No matter how long you wait in a potential queue, it is never as long as it's real life equivalent by the time you've decided to join it.
you are quite right, almost every song by lovage is sexy!
Queueing - the bane of my life. There's one woman who gets on my bus at my bus stop, and she has this habit of just hanging around by the front of the queue, and then barging in. Is it irrational of me to want to pull her fake fur hat over her eyes and laugh continiously?!
Greenhamster (If I may call you that, which feels distinctly odd having known you for ten years)...does the word 'Upstaged' mean anything to you, damnit?
Jane, Greenhamster (tee hee) and Gary?
Additions coming right up.
Well there are so many Dave's out there, and 'Greenhamster Dave' was getting a bit unwieldy. Seeing it at my place sitting over at Uborka last week made me just too embarrassed to claim my beer.
Either suggest a suitable alternative, or kiss my small balding green tail.
The Student Queue
The revolutionary spirit of 1968 lives on as students seize the streets! Well, they form a large circle around the cash machine - to HELL with your patriarchal "lines", to HELL we say! - completely blocking the pavement.
George A Romero's Queue Of The Dead
How I wish I had 10 items or less. Or that that woman's chicken breasts would scan and didn't require a price check. Or that she had 100 items or less. Not that I have anything better to do, which at least might give me a reason to be agitated. I shuffle, but I don't move. I lean on my trolley, and sway from side to side. My head lolls, and I enter the Q-Hole. I don't even notice that it is my turn when it comes, and bag my groceries without thinking. I can stay in the Q-Hole until I get home, and only then notice that I have once more forgotten to buy kitchen foil.
That's a scarily gaunt and soulless queuing experience there, Mr. Curtis.
Going in.
I always reckon that the best thing to do with Parallel Queuers is to make a great show of offering them the place ahead of you.
"I'm sorry - were you here first?" - in a loud, clear, scrupulously polite, edge-free tone of voice, accompanied by a broad, sweeping hand gesture.
It usually makes them feel about that high. They'll either decline your offer and fall in meekly behind you, or else they'll accept your offer, and feel guilty and ashamed for the rest of the queue.
Except for the 10% who will brazenly accept your offer without a glimmer of remorse. Such people will, of course, burrrrn in the fires of HELL. So that's OK then.
Ah, nice style, Mike.
Nice style.