IT always confused me that the British didn’t mind queueing — enjoyed it, were into it, even.
I was never too enamoured with standing in line waiting for something I didn’t particularly want, but I think there are now enough reasons to actually bemoan the death of the good old-fashioned queue.
As a kid, I used to be sent down the chippie on a Friday for the usual artery-clogging portions of fish, chips, scraps and mushy peas — but at least we didn’t go large in those days.
Inevitably, there would be a queue, stretching out of the shop, along the road and right past a nearby bakers. You might be in for a 30-minute wait, but you didn’t mind too much. There would usually be someone you knew who you could have a reasonably pleasant chat with.
The queues outside the turnstiles at football or rugby matches were often exciting affairs as well, adding to the atmosphere and pre-match build-up.
These days though, queueing is a completely different ball game. So much so, that it’s not a ball game at all.
Waiting for a prescription in a queue the other day, my number was called out, only for someone to leap up and protest that they were before me but had not yet been dealt with. “Because yours is a controlled drug it takes longer,” the assistant explained.
“I’ll be lucky if I get home by midnight,” the complainant moaned to anyone who would listen, as if she had something urgent to attend to. Me, I just had to rush back to work.
My partner was in a queue elsewhere, waiting to return an item, but being held up by a woman attempting to exchange an expired voucher for some free-nappies. “It isn’t fair. The voucher’s run out before I’ve had the baby,” she moaned.
After much fuss, she got what she wanted on the grounds that the manager sussed that the rest of the queue, consisting mostly of people on their lunch breaks, was becoming inpatient and only had an hour’s lunch break.
In the Post Office it’s much the same. Go in there to pick up a parcel or pay for something and you find yourself in a long snaking queue of people waiting for their various benefits. Nothing wrong in that, except they — those with more time than you — are the ones rocking from one foot to another and moaning that “it’s doin’ me ‘ed in”.
There’s no-one to talk to anymore and, to be honest, if anyone attempts a conversation I do my best to make like The Invisible Man. If you respond and are, for example, waiting for a bus, you may end up having to sit next to someone and make conversation with them.
The art of queueing is dead and that’s mostly down to the fact that technology has made us so impatient. If a promised email hasn’t arrived in minutes, we’re on the phone asking where it is, if a company can’t guarantee next day delivery, then forget it.
Instant coffee, instant credit: yes please.
We literally can’t wait any more and, with the ability to view, order and pay for anything we want via the internet, we won’t have to for too much longer. The sooner, the better.