Sometimes the important news of the week is not worth repeating, and with politics and weather dominating the media, I looked elsewhere for inspiration. I found it in an article about a woman challenging the science behind the everyday queue in public places. She was standing with her baggage at the airport to check in and refused to move up when the line in front of her began to thin out. She replied to anybody who asked her why she wouldn’t tighten the line that it wouldn’t matter when she moved up, because everybody would get waited upon in the same order.
This meant that a growing gap was creating space between the queue near the front of the line and herself with the others waiting behind her. Her intention, then, was to wait until the entire line ahead of her was gone, and then she would parade herself–dragging, carrying or rolling her luggage–up to the head of the stanchions and cordoning ribbons or ropes– across the open space to the counter.
This is what is sometimes referred to as commanding a room, in which your behavior draws attention to your authoritative presence. But if you have no authority, you sometimes seem the fool.
Two examples of this concept of commanding a room appear in the Harry Potter movies(1), when Professor Snape entered the classroom, magically shut the windows with a wave of his hand and bringing systematic bangs of finality, then intoned to the class softly, “Turn to page 394.”
Perhaps the etiquette rules for behavior in the queue also appear on page 394 of Emily Post’s guidebook (yes, it’s still out there).
Delores Umbridge was another Hogwarts example, but she used her stride (in pink high heels, no less) to make her point. People of every age are familiar with the sounds of footsteps approaching; my mother had an elementary school teacher with a wooden leg, whose comings and goings were particularly frightful because of the distinctive step of one limb and the clunking of the other. Prosthetics were heavy in the 1930s.
This power play from the woman in the airport is certainly debatable. She apparently set herself up as a living challenge line for those behind her to dare step ahead of her (none did) and took on the role of gatekeeper for the rest of those waiting their turn. Everybody there was “next,” and quietly and politely adopted that role for however long it took for those in front to move up. The woman shunned that role and made the line, to observers, seem awkward.
The placing of ropes and stanchions is designed to provide an orderly open-ended system for a specific purpose. The other airport users–staff and passengers alike–used the public walkways to move about, and those in line to check in were protected by clear lines of usage and boundaries. One commenter noted that the major problem would have arisen if her standing so far back began to cause spillage past the end of the queue design and into the public areas. Also, the staff at the airport and passers-by would normally have a clear idea of how many persons were waiting in line, and her defiance skewed that perception. It was not the speed at which people were served, since the next person is always the next person until the one ahead of them is finished with their business, but a queue depends upon a spatial order to operate optimally.
One time I was pulling up to an outdoor ATM, and a large vehicle was there finishing a transaction. I did not move up behind their bumper to wait, but since no other cars were approaching at that moment, I stopped a good car length or two behind while I retrieved my ATM card. A driver moments later was pulling up behind me and swerved to move ahead of me, pulling up to the other vehicle. Obviously they thought I was being an idiot by not moving up. Instead, I knew they were an idiot for being rude.
It’s all about giving reasonable space. And waiting one’s turn the normal way.
(1) Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)
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