The queue conundrum

Scientific queue management hasn’t caught on everywhere. The jostling continues

The movie Kaalia (1981) featured a queue-despising Amitabh Bachchan declaring famously that queues began from wherever he stood. That shook our faith in the queue system a bit. While many of us endure queues like martyrs, the smart ones bypass them. Some clog it perversely.

Confused as we usually are by movies-inspired fake pride, we suspect that standing behind somebody in a queue amounts to a lowering of status. So we level the field by stepping to the left or right. This causes a corresponding zigzagging behind us, and soon the queue dissolves into a crowd.

A single counter will have at least three strands of queues developing in front of it, each strand competing to access the window of the counter first. One way for latecomers to get ahead is to recognise a long-lost friend ahead in the queue, hail him loudly, and join him there breathlessly enquiring about his welfare. Or, in a display of chutzpah, you can ignore everybody, and walk right up to the counter on the pretext of making an enquiry. And if unchallenged by others in the queue, you quickly transact your business with fiendish gratification. If challenged, you mumble that you were there earlier and had left the queue for some reason.

Standing patiently in a queue is no guarantee that we get what we had queued up for. The queue system collapses when everyone is rushing for a seat on a local train or bus. Or when the stressed counter-clerk timidly serves whoever jumps to the head of the queue, encouraging disorder and causing queue-rage, akin to road-rage except for the honking.

On those occasions when we have sweated in a queue for long, the relief on reaching the head of the queue is exhilarating. We seek to get our money’s worth, knowing the moment is short-lived. We hang on and try to communicate to the counter-clerk through the plexiglass partition. The monosyllabled clerk sitting on the other side of the glass says something deliberately inaudible, forcing us to read his lips. We gesture and mime and rephrase our questions, hoping to extract a clearer answer, while the jostling folks behind us impatiently sway left and right, deluding themselves that there is some forward movement. Everyone’s blood pressure rises, and life expectancy reduces.

At a petrol bunk, or at the highway toll plaza, the two-wheeler rider at the head of the queue, having completed the transaction, stays riveted to the spot and commences reorganising his life. He rearranges his backpack, sorts his purse slowly, denomination-wise, kicks the starter pedal of his bike five times, smacks his forehead, switches on the ignition, and repeats the process. Had he moved forward a few feet, at least two people behind him in the line could have come up and completed their transactions. But no, it's his privilege to make everybody behind him sweat and seethe. It makes his day.

At the supermarket, the customer with all day at his disposal will wait till he reaches the head of the queue, and halfway through the billing goes back for one more item, comes back, and grills the clerk with a series of questions that he could very well have asked the assistants in the shopping aisles. The clerk feels challenged and drops everything to quench this fellow’s thirst for knowledge, ignoring the other customers shuffling and coughing to signal their impatience. It has no effect on the queue-clogger. Time passes differently for him. Time is a state of mind, as Einstein said.