The Tricky Art of Co-Existing by Sandi Toksvig

Author:Sandi Toksvig
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781615192229
Publisher: The Experiment
Published: 2015-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

4. Don’t squeeze everything

No one wants your hands all over the fresh fruit or bread.

5. Read the signs

You will upset people if you enter the “five items or less” line and aren’t eligible. In fact, the degree of upset may be faintly astonishing. If you see someone with six items in the five items only aisle, again, it’s not worth dueling over. Actually, while we are waiting, let’s consider the thorny issue of waiting in line for a moment.

Waiting in Line

An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one.

—George Mikes (1912–87), Hungarian-born British author

No race on earth seems to line up, or “queue” as they call it, quite like the British. There seems to be an ingrained mechanism of patience for this form of waiting. George Mikes, in his 1946 publication How to be an Alien, called it “the national passion of an otherwise dispassionate race.” The next time you have to wait in a line, consider the knightly origins of the word “queue.” It is traced back to the fifteenth century, and is not British at all but French for “a tail” or, more impressively, the heraldic term “tail of a beast.” This seems appropriate, as the first queue I can think of in history is when Noah managed to persuade all those animals to line up for a cruise.

Waiting in line is tedious, but it’s an equal opportunity employer. It’s tedious for everyone. No one likes to wait. I have never met anyone who sees lining up as a joyful occupation. It is basically a test to see how long you can stand in one place without beginning to either dribble or speak to yourself.

Self-service counters in supermarkets were invented to make people feel as though they were not in line. In fact, by the time you have called six times for assistance at a self-service check-out, it has taken longer than standing in line for someone to take the money from you. All etiquette for waiting in line springs from a universal loathing of standing behind someone else.

There are some basic rules:

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