Sitting Room, Brampton Ash

Well I hope you’ve all had a Merry Christmas and all that.

I did promise myself that I would not post until the new year, but we have today received a response to the letter sent to Peter’s Post Office in Gympie, Australia.

It reads:

Dear Mr Deed

Thank you for your correspondence regarding the queuing system at the Gympie Post Shop. We appreciate your patience while we investigated your concerns.

Australia Post prides itself in providing customers with a courteous and helpful service and appreciates every opportunity to improve this service and correct any faults that may exist.

In order to assist with your enquiry, we contacted the Area Office for the Gympie Post Shop for investigation and comment.

The Area Manager has advised the Gympie Post Shop has had a two-queue system for quite some time. The two queues are serviced by six counters which allow for staff to call from the alternate queue if one queue is halted resulting in a very good queue management system.

As you may not be aware, the Gympie Post Shop is a very large store and to have a single queue is not a viable option as customers would have to queue out the door.

We thank you for your feedback as it is vital to our ongoing commitment in providing quality customer service. We appreciate your time and effort in bringing this matter to our attention.

Yours sincerely

Darren Minehan

Customer and Network Liason Manager

Tagged, end of the queue.

Oh dear, I’ve been tagged.

When I was younger we used to call it tig. Which I think sounds much nicer. I was going to ignore this game but as everyone else is doing it, and as I’ve also been avoiding queues recently, I thought that I might as well get in on the festive spirit. Or something.

Okay, so five things that you didn’t know about William Deed.

Here goes…

1. Nothing makes me happier than putting on a pair of brand new socks.

   

2. I am Welsh. But I’m not very good at it.

   

3. Nostalgia for children television programs bores me silly.

   

4. I once took part in a reality TV series.

   

5. Gary Wood paints his toe nails.

   

The end.

A School in Leicester, Leicester

We have another guest queuer today. But not just any old queuer, this story is from my big sister Samantha who has also started to blog, go visit her here.

UPDATE. Gary Wood has started to provide marvellous illustrations for this post, the first of which appears in the relevant section of this queue story. This is turning out to be a truly fantastic group post.

As a teacher in a large secondary school my job on Thursdays is to ‘manage’ the lunch queue. There are three stages to the lunch queue, first there is the entry to the dining hall queue – this is patrolled by a beautifully petite lady who has the voice of a prison guard.

Any miscreants are unequivocally told to “Get to the back.” Misdemeanours may include pushing in the queue (that’s each other, not into the line), trying to blag you and six friends into lunch early with a note written by a teacher (usually fake), or the ambiguous ‘being cheeky’.

The second part of the queue is the most chaotic. In order to encourage a civilised ethos to eating, senior management have dictated that all bags and coats must be left before entering the third and most precarious queuing area. It is here that the queue breaks down to ‘It’s A Knockout’ proportions with the hungriest students hurling their belonging to the back wall, with frailer creatures left cowering towards the bin for cover. I see my role here as to protect the weak and keep the peace.

Queuing slows down as students enter the final phase of the lunchtime scrum, I try to restore some sort of order but this is made nigh on impossible by the double queue dilemma – hot dinners or sandwiches. Those waiting for the (delicious) chickpea curry or vegetable lasagne may take slightly longer than those trying to grab the last cheese cob. However they still need to wait for the tills so let too many through and suddenly you have thirty students in an enclosed area, some wielding custard while fumbling for their change.

Unfortunately you’re not allowed to take photos in school unless you’re a journalist, and so for a picture you can go here.

Greggs, Arndale Centre in Manchester

I realise that I have been rather quiet of late. In some part this is due to recent time spent at the Love Agency, more of which can be read about on their blog, and also because I am unsure if Standinaqueue is able to withstand the chaos that is christmas shopping.

Unfortunately tensions seem to be quite high in the Christmas queue, and so I warn you that things will be rather quiet here at Standinaqueue as I attempt to avoid this festive spirit for the next couple of weeks. Normal service will resume in the New Year.

Outside contributors, as always, are welcome.

I’m not sure if Mancunians have a strong queuing culture, as it was rare to find a Greggs with a good long line in progress. I’d say as a bakery they were just as popular as other Greggs across the country, but there seemed to be no set rules or local understanding on how best to queue.

In this Greggs, customers seemed to treat the bakery like a bar, and would stand at various places along the counter, with sometimes a build up occuring at certain points.

I thought this method to be unsatisfactory as it created a lot of anxiety as to whether or not I was standing in the right queue.

Just round the corner from this Greggs, within the same shopping precinct, there is another Greggs.

Also very popular, but again no genuine queue formations. I did pop into this Greggs after work for a Christmas bake but I was unfortunately on the phone to Gary Wood  and therefore unable to take photographs.

There was a sign on each of the eight tills saying “Please queue here”, but it was hard to know which of the tills were in use. Also, quite a strong line had started to appear to the right of the shop, and so of course it was this queue that I joined.

Although it was quite a slow moving queue as various newcomers to the shop took advantage of the tills with no queues and would swoop in before those at the front of the prominent queue had the opportunity to move across. This resulted in a lot of tutting and one man in front of me even stated “There’s a queue here.”

These signs of protests were ignored by all but one queue jumper, who merely looked at the long queue and then pointed at the sign above the till that said “Please queue here.”

Saturday Morning, Australia

I apologise for my lack of posts at the moment, but being in Love is taking up a lot of my time. Well, I say a lot of my time, but really the hours that it consumes are what most people know as the working day.

Luckily for us all, this week standinaqueue has been kept going by the lovely Lainey, the Anonymous American, and now the antipodean Flaneur, Laurence of Australia:

I set out on Saturday morning with a freshly charged battery in my mobile and high hopes of capturing endless queue scenarios in the shopping mall. It was after all the first weekend of Christmas Shopping. People should be queuing en mass.

Arriving at the multi-storey car park. I was encouraged by the unavailability of any free car spaces other than on the roof. On my way down I spotted a small line of cars that had been behind me as I searched for that elusive empty bay. The one I found must have been the last because these guys were still weaving up and down between floors searching for Shangri-La.

Entering the mall I headed for the tobacco counter at Coles Supermarket. Here, on most occasions, exists a mythical “queue” that the HHGTTG calls The Hidden Queue. It is supposed to be populated by experienced and veteran queuers who see no need to form a line. They each know who is next and who is last. They just mill around as a casual crowd. Whenever a tyro queuer approaches they form a solid wall to ensure that no queue jumping takes place.

It was tenish in the morning with no-one at the counter. So I sat in Michel’s Coffee to wait for the hidden queue to form. And sat and sat and sat. I sat so long that the waitress insisted that I have a cup of coffee. They are so kind at Michel’s they gave me a free post-it-pad leaf with my coffee. The coffee was awful

Thirty minutes I sat there with only the occasional lone smoker approaching the counter. The mall was busy but no-one was buying.

So I moved on. I headed south, underground to Woolies. Nothing. up two storeys then down one. Nothing but a “take a number” queue at Baker’s Delight.

Disappointed I stumbled out onto the paved pedestrian mall in the vain hope of finding a queue in front of some street vendor. No again. Just the largest non-working water clock in the Southern hemisphere. Think about it. Exactly what countries lie in the Southern hemisphere?

Eureka! (Not the Stockade, the Aristotle one).

There was a queue at Borders. The Great British Bookshop had come up trumps. Not at all surprising. Their queue topography is designed to allow only the rigid British style queue to form. The area is strictly cordoned off allowing a queue width of only one-and-a-half queuers. I’m sure that barbed wire might have appeared on the queue area plans at one point but removed in favour of reduced queuer compensation awards.

So, almost deeply satisfied (I didn’t join the queue), I headed for the car and home. Ascending the escalators towards the roof I spotted the rare “runaway queue”. This is known to happen on occasions where the social interaction is at its highest level during an extended queuing period. The intimate bonding that takes place allows the queue to move off as a single body. It wanders the shopping mall, led by the senior queuer, in a search for the perfect place to continue their queuing.

This one stopped at the passport photo machine and was still there when I drove past heading for that last taste of shopping mall queuing, the car park exit pay station.

Regards

Laurence of Australia

Boots, Princes Street, Edinburgh

Another guest queuer, but this time not anonymous. The lovely Lainey has sent over her experience after standing in a queue in Boots. Exact location is as yet unknown, but once I find out I’ll adjust the heading:

Ahoy there.

With the aid of some fairy liquid and a vice, I managed to get the pics out my phone. And so, on with the story.

The above pic demonstrates the queue in which I am standing.

The place: Boots.

The time: lunchtime.

The queue: seemingly out of control.

As you can see, there is a random bloke standing near the queue but is not actually in it. My first thought (when I was further back in the queue, and before i could see the empty space in front of him) was that he didn’t understand the direction of the queue but as I approached him, it became clear he was waiting for someone. But who?

Of course, for the woman in the beige coat with the fur trim, to the left of the pic, but she wasn’t ‘properly’ in the queue either! She was just hovering about.

So she was the queue pusher -inner? But then, the lone man suddenly left the shop with someone completely unexpected from another queue somewhere else in the shop. So was this woman pushing in with no back up? No- she was just with her friend who was finally being served in the third pic (although she is hidden). Phew! No-one was pushing in and normal service continued.

Finally my story has been told. I am unburdened.

elaine.

Salina, Kansas

An anonymous queue this one. It just turned up in my inbox.

 

And the surprising thing is even though it seems to be from the States, it didn’t come from a proper email source but a mobile phone.

Lovely queuing etiquette though with a respectful distance between the man in green trousers and the person at the counter. Judging from the surroundings I’m assuming that this is a hardware store, where you wouldn’t expect such courteous behaviour.

Hilton Park Services, M6

Just a quick stop, and a quick observation.

At half six on a Sunday evening there are more people queuing for coffee than there are for burgers.

Wood Green Animal Shelter, Cambridgeshire

Quite a grim day today so we went for a little outing to Wood Green Animal Shelter. Once you get over the smell the time can pass quite quickly.

Although you do have to be careful of what you queue for.

That’s Farm at the back of the queue wearing the inside out sheep. She quite liked this queue because, although it was a slow mover, when you got to the front you could get one of these:

This was Molly, who we then got to take for a walk.

After a bit of Here Molly, Hello Molly, Aren’t you lovely Molly?, we had to take her back to the queuing area.

We half heartedly stood behind this rather large Mother and daughter combo, and reluctantly waited to hand Molly back.

When they got to the front of the queue, Farm and Marc weren’t yet sure about Molly.

But I had my suspicions.

Marc couldn’t decide on an empty stomach so, as it’s a Friday, we went and had some fish and chips at the Wood Green canteen.

While in the queue we looked over Molly’s particulars.

It said that she could be a bit shy at first and was rather wary of very tall people, but once you got to know her she was a total cuddle slut. Or something like that.

So after our fish and chips, which were very good, we went back to the main reception.

And Farm and Marc said that they would very much like to give Molly a home.

Then we saw a horse.

But Farm said she had no room for a horse.