Sunday, June 21, 2015

More hate mail - queues

This post is dedicated to hating two types of people a)those who are in front of you in a queue and b) those who are behind you in the same queue
a) Those in front - the 'deep customisers' : Murphy's law does all the set-up for this act - you are already in the slowest moving queue leading to a counter staffed by an introspective ticket agent. This is when each person ahead of you decides to engage in a complex customised transaction with the hapless ticket agent. Or just enquire about a complex customised transaction and discuss for several hours before arriving at the simple one.
'We are 8 of us and we'd like to sit in 3 equal groups. 2 of us want to be between 30 and 40 feet from the screen. 3 of us are actually a couple and would like to sit together...blah. Aisa milega kya?'
'Nahi. Front row, Saath me 8 seats. Chahiye ki nahi?'
'Picture acchi hai? Chal rahi hai?' and so on.
Now imagine this frustration multiplied 8 times. That's a wedding buffet for you. The person ahead of you in the queue is invariably a perfectionist to the point of OCD. Needs to get the quantity on his plate exactly right, down to the last microliter of dal and the last particle of rice. And when a few extra ml of dal pour into his plate by mistake, you can see the disappointment writ large on his face.
'How could I screw this up? I just spent 5 minutes on this dal-pouring activity at the expense of these 100 people waiting behind me patiently and hungrily. And still poured excess dal on my plate. My career as an accurate wedding-buffet-portion-size measurer-and-eater is over - I'm finished. Oh wait! Let me redeem myself by getting the exactly right sized Paapad from this collection of 1000. Not this one, too big. Not this one, too crooked' etc is what must be going through the fellow's mind.
b) Those behind - the 'perpendiculars' :You finally get your turn to buy your ticket after the deep-customisers in front of you did their thing. The guys behind you are a different category of pain - they are the perpendicular queuers. As luck would have it, ticket agent goes off on a two minute break leaving you waiting. Guy just behind you also walks up to the counter and stands on your right, guy behind him moves up too and stands to your left and so on. Standing close enough to you so the ticket agent wouldn't be very clear who's first when he returns. The queue is now officially a perpendicular one also called a standard Indian queue. All of them squeeze a palm with money in it into the counter when the ticket agent returns. And simultaneously issue instructions to the ticket agent. The ticket agent now shifts to a more competitive process where the most aggressive get serviced first. The only way around this is to become a really fat and heavy person and retain your position right in front of the counter so there's no doubt in the agent's mind when he returns from the break.