The Queue is a State of Mind

Paranoia takes many forms, but I think that one can safely assume that the condition is not distant when one begins to formulate a Tao of Queuing.

The sequence I remember best from ‘The Truman Show’ is the one where Truman tries to get somewhere in his car and is constantly blocked by queues of cars which magically appear to block his progress. Although Truman does not realise it, these motorised irritations are actually being orchestrated by the television company which has total control of his life.

It is hard not to believe that a similar controlling producer is placing Difficult Customers ahead of me in queues to provoke the characteristics of impotent fury that must make good television for some audience in another dimension which finds barely controlled aggression amusing.

Consider the last few occasions on which I have had to queue; these are the sorts of ‘puppets’ that invariably get in font of me in queues:

1. The Quick Check Out for “10 items or less.” (Every time I see that it riles me. “less” is wrong. It should be “fewer” on the “‘less’ for quantity and ‘fewer’ for number” rule. I think that designers of check outs do things like that to get us into the right state of mind for aggression so that later in the day the security camera operators can compile ‘best bits’ of infuriated customer reactions when things go wrong.
The woman in front of me had two items in her hand and therefore could be expected to move quickly though the till and not hinder my purchases. When she arrived at the till she leaned over and produced a whole range of further items, including a bottle of Champagne with a security tab on it. Needless to say the tag was impervious to any attempt to remove it and eventually the assistant had to resort to brute force. During this titanic struggle a substantial number of people waltzed through the other tills.
2 All people in front of me seem to find the demand for payment for the goods that they are purchasing a total shock and scrabble about in their bags or pockets as if this was the first time that they had ever had to do it. Time passes and gradually the red mist begins to colour my sight.

3 People who forget their PIN numbers and then joke about it should be shot. Shot slowly if they then decide to pay by cash and build up the total amount by seeing how much change they can get rid of from wallet, purse, bag, pockets, and vacuous smiles.
4 People who don’t really seem to have grasped the idea of the new money and who find the concept of using paper and metal as pounds and pence as an insurmountable mathematical problem on a par with Fermat’s Last Theorem.

5 People who buy clothes or small electrical equipment in Tesco’s or comparable stores. These items have security tags (sometimes cunningly hidden) composed of two plastic parts (one of which is supposed to explode in a fountain of indelible ink if tampered with) and which are supposed to be easily removable by the assistant by using a simple magnetic device. It always fails and time ticks on as I wait with fixed smile.

6 People who have accumulated obscure coupons from strange places all of which have to be checked individually to ensure that the 10p deduction is within the date limit and of course the bar codes do not read and all the numbers have to be typed in individually by hand.

7 Customers, who wait until they get to the till to ask how much an item is, then ask for a smaller or larger pack which needs the cashier to call for a supervisor who then goes off and . . . time passes.

8 Friendly customers who engage the cashier in mindless phatic conversation which is unedifying, platitudinous, vapid, anodyne and time eating!

9 Customers who think that cashiers are well connected executives with intimate friends on the Tesco Board of Directors who are able to explain wide ranging company policy and enter into a ‘fascinating’ debate about policy directions instead of getting out of my way.

10 People who can’t pack without examining each item to see how it could fit in the three dimensional puzzle which is the interior space of the plastic bag, or people who cannot get their cards or money before all items are securely tucked into bags.

It is hardly surprising that one is able to list people with ease when one spends so much of one’s time in supermarkets. I shudder to think just how much of our significant social contact is conducted under the fluorescent lights of Tesco or Sainsbury. More amazing 'mathematical' ideas about supermarket queues may be found at: http://www.nzmaths.co.nz/Statistics/Probability/MurphysLaw.aspx

On a more pleasantly retail note, we had lunch in Mimmas Restaurant on Churchill Way. Toni liked the ambience and I was left wondering when I last experienced that particular ambience. I decided that Mimmas is one of those restaurants that in my previously life I had only visited in the hours of darkness! In the light of the subterranean gloom in the small restaurant the a la carte was much more interesting than the ‘Lunch time special’ so we ended up paying £30 each for our meal rather than the £7-95 that we had set out expecting.

The whitebait to start was unexceptional, but a welcome reminder of what used to be one of my favourite starters.

Toni stuck to what he knew and opted for the mussels which were cooked in a slightly spicy sauce and which were delicious (he did allow me to sample one of them) whereas I went with the chef’s special which was fresh tuna stuffed with apricot and cheese. I ate it but would not order it again as the tastes were strong and confusing and they worked against the taste of the meaty fish steak.

The bottle of Faustino Rose was ludicrously overpriced at almost sixteen quid, but drinkable. I cannot remember the last time that I paid over a tenner for a bottle of wine in real life; we have to do something about the iniquitous mark up by shameless restaurants.

I shall calm my spendthrift nerves by watching Barca play Sevilla in the tranquil setting of my living room with the silent contemplation of Toni (ha!) and then, perhaps, 'Saw III', the everyday story of psychotic folk.

And so to bed.