Reply to: Immigrants to be taught the fine British art of how to queue

[lilelvis2000]

Does this mean I can now run over motocycles that jump queues?

[Gibbon]

I had to go for a blood test at the hospital the other week. So I got there at opening time - 7 a.m. - thinking there'd be nobody there.

There was about 80 seats and it was standing room only.

Same happened to me but it was full of old retired people
There was a few other younger workers like myself looking at their watches.

I think they ought to introduce free tea and scones at 10:30 am but only if you arrive after this time.

It would be cheper than the lost working hours.

[thunderlizard]

The hospital should have installed something like this:
http://milkfed.nic.in/image002.JPG

[RichardCranium]

I had to go for a blood test at the hospital the other week. So I got there at opening time - 7 a.m. - thinking there'd be nobody there.

There was about 80 seats and it was standing room only.

But they had a ticket machine like at the deli counter in the supermarket. Everyone was holding their ticket and every time there was a BEEP! as the LED display incremented, everyone looked at their ticket to see if it still said "83" or whether it had magically been "38" all the time and they were next.

Being in possession of a little paper ticket with a number on and a display changes with a BEEP! is sufficient entertainment for most mortals.

I think the Catholics call this 'Purgatory'.

[VectraMan]

At least at the Post Office you get the excitement of guessing which number counter you'll be served at. Trying to judge who amongst the people being served is likely to take the longest; looking at all the people in front of you to see what they're carrying and what they're likely to do; figuring out if any of the staff have that "I'm about to take my break look". And then each time somebody is called and you get to inch forward you can calculate it all over again, until finally you get to the front of the queue bursting with excitement.

Hours of fun.

[BolshieBastard]

Immigrants are to be educated in one of Britain's most important etiquettes - how to queue properly.

Foreigners applying to settle in the UK will have to learn about the revered British practice of forming an orderly line for everything from buses to sandwiches.

Ministers even want the art of queuing to be included in citizenship tests, which immigrants must pass before settling in the country.

They believe that queue-jumping is damaging social cohesion as the majority of Brits find such behaviour unacceptable.

More: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...lining-up.html

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Whilst on the subject - queued in still remaining open Post Offices are so bloody long now even on like Mondays that they remind me of Soviet Union

Yeah. Queue up for the plane back to their own ******* country unless they have a very good reason to be here.

[thunderlizard]

Starbucks had a brilliant thing going for a while, but I don't think they do it any more. As you joined the back of the gigantic queue, a smiley helper asked you what you wanted to order. He/she did absolutely nothing with this information. But the very fact of telling them was enough to create a psychological commitment to the queue in the mind of the customer, and make them very unlikely to slope off to the other coffee shop next door.

[TimberWolf]

MacDonalds have taken what I would regard as a retrograde step with regard to latest queuing technology. It used to be the case, here in the UK, that if an establishment had multiple serving points, you could pick the best one and take pot luck with that and how long you'd wait there, much like at a supermarket to this day. In that system, you only had a 1 in n (n being the number of counters) of picking the best queue in the whole joint, ignoring such details such as queue length which for the sake of argument is assumed equal. This meant you were mostly unhappy by the time you got to the freaking counter. Anyway, this system was mostly done away with in favour of having one big snaky maze-like queue which was much fairer. But when you go to MacD a nice fair single queue forms at the head of the 1/2 dozen or so separate counters and then some retarded spotty oik comes along and directs you to the slowest queue in the whole freaking establishment, behind the woman who is ordering for a coach party and has lots of screaming kids.

[AtW]

How do people get served in an orderly and timely manner in a non-queuing society?

2 ways:
1) not enough products to queue for
2) enough staff is available to deal with all queries with maximum queue of 2-3 people

I don't understand this tulip - people on benefits get some cash from post office, ffs, make them members of staff there to service others unless they find a better job, plenty of well young people were in that queue

[MrMark]

You know, if the Sharia mob take over eventually, we may be forced to have separate male and female check-outs at the supermarket, bank etc. I'm not so sure that would be a bad thing!

[thunderlizard]

Old Soviet Joke

About 100 people are queuing outside for the bread shop to open.
The shopkeeper gets a call from the distribution centre: instead of the 100 loaves he'd been expecting, they're only going to manage about 80.
So the shopkeeper goes outside and says "OK, if there are any Jews waiting, go home. No bread for you".
The Jews mutter and wander off.

An hour later, he gets another call. Instead of 80 loaves, it's looking more like 20. So the shopkeeper goes outside and says "OK, Party members only today I'm afraid. Any non-Party members, go home. No bread for you".
The non-Party members mutter and wander off.

After another hour, he gets another call from the distribution centre. Unfortunately they won't be making a delivery to him at all today. So he goes outside and tells the remaining people in the queue they might as well go home.

"See," says one of the Party members, "always the Jews get the best treatment".

[TimberWolf]

How do people get served in an orderly and timely manner in a non-queuing society?

[xoggoth]

Only OLD PEOPLE do that. I rest my case.

[AtW]

Talking of the Queue Offices - half the people there were not posting post, but getting money out of it - FFS, that's what banks are for!

[xoggoth]

Maybe on this issue, instead of them learning from us, we should learn from them.

Then we wouldn't have to wait for ages while some ghastly OLD PERSON at the post office counter spends ages talking about how her parcel is for her sister Dolly's 40th wedding anniversary and how it was late last year because of the snow and hasn't the price gone up this year and she's not sure she's got that much but might have another 20p in her handbag .

We could just smack the old git over the head with a baseball bat, Lithuanian style, and get on!