orbitmic

Two 'queuing incidents' in two days. First, the usual boarding queue at an outstation airport. A huge line of people forming and blocking the gate, obviously less than 10% of which were going to be entitled to board when boarding starts. Predictably, this results in confusion, when boarding is called, the people wrongly queuing of course do not want to get out of the queue for fear of losing their place in the queue so they keep blocking and people who should be boarding in the queue don't know if the people in front of them are people who should be there or people who are just sticking to the wrong place to be "in the queue" when their parallel queue will be boarding much later. They also can't go and ask 40 people ahead of them if they are in the boarding queue or not, especially as they would then lose their own place in the right queue. Stupid.

Then today, at an airport with flights to all three London airports (those who know me will have long identified it), check in opens 2 hours before each flight and a LCY flight is leaving 35 minutes before the next LHR one, but of course, people bound for LHR have long been queueing and are blocking a way as part of a queue which is not even moving. People join the queue thinking that there is a (not unusual) computer problem and the queue is in fact so long that when check in staff meekly shout "London City?" people at the back of the queue can't even hear them. I did so told the two young women in front of me whom I knew were going to City too that as we are going to LCY we can move forward as it seems that most other people are going to LHR which is not open. I ask them to ask every few people if they are going to London Heathrow to make sure we don't pass legitimate queuers but not a single one as we move forward, except that one of the men they are asking starts talking to the two poor American girls as though they were dirt telling them that this is not where the queue start. To which I am answering that his queue has not started yet, at least not in front of the check in desk as our flight is open and not his. The two poor girls had stopped behind him ready to be intimidated by this self-appointed check in blockader of sorts.

Many people behind us whom I later saw were bound for LCY did not dare to "jump the queue" except that this is not jumping "the queue" as it is just jumping a queue that should not be there in the first place and waited, absurdly, for over an hour whilst the check in counters were empty since no other LCY passenger (eligible to check in) dared to move forward.

So for goodness sake, people, queue in a place that does not prevent people people who will need to reach what you are queuing for before you. If you cannot work it out, then please, stop queueing because right now, you are merely depriving people who should be going before you of their legitimate access which, as it happens, you do not have because your group is not boarding or your flight is not checking it yet, and as people can't just quiz 20, 30, 40, or 50 people in front of then who might or might not be in the right queue, your behaviour encourages anarchy and people just deciding that they will assume that nobody in the queue is legitimate (typically not true) and therefore cutting the legitimate queuers as well as the blockaders like you. Queuing in the wrong queue is not being disciplined