h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

wish I'd seen it in peer review because then I could have asked you to include the worlds worst place for queing. This is without doubt: DRUMMER STREET BUS SATION, CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND. It is completely impossible to practice the fine art of queing here, and all the bises come into the wrong stops anyway, so basically regardless of when you arrived at the station the only way to get on a bus is to remain ever vigilant and just happen to be near the place where the bus turns up, and then be able to get through the people waiting for other buses to get to yours. And you must be quick!
If the bus fills, as it invarably will any time you need to get home in a hurry, then it will leave.

Great entry, and soooooooo true.

FABT

Excellent entry. One to really start the blood boiling with recognition. So here's my winge of the day so far:

People that catch my bus (20 or 12) in Reading seem completely incapable of queueing. What's particularly annoying is that this isn't necessarily the foreigners who are the worst offenders. These are the commuters and school girls.

Queuing to get on a train is even worse. I'm not sure if it's a Southern England thing or what (I don't remember queues in Nottingham/Swansea/Newport/Edinburgh/London, etc being as bad) but the commuters (people who have usually sold their souls to capitalism and read the Telegraph or worse the Daily Mail) are desperate to get on the train to get free seats. They cram round the door making it difficult for anyone to get off the train to begin with.

I wonder if there is any headway to be made from the notion of the English exporting their love of queueing abroad?

To illustrate: On holiday in France, at a certain water park, there are long maze queues for certain rides. This fills the English holidaymaker with delight. What fills him/her with even greater delight is blocking the path of the non-English visitors to the park, who seem to be labouring under the illusion that the queue is just a large social gathering of some sort. Even the most determined non-queuer eventually gave up after trying to push past hundreds of staunchly waiting English holdaymakers with sharp elbows...

As an aside, care is needed in typing 'queuer' (as I discovered while proof-reading this). An unfortunate typo could completely change the meaning of an entry...

I think the innability of bussers to queue propperly is the fact that bus stops aren't designed to facilitate queueing. Every day I take first the train and then the buss to school and the crowd from the train always ends upp milling around the busstation trying to be in the place where they think the buss will stop.

Something that always strikes me as funny is that I frequently see queues for queue-ticket dispensers.

I hope this article will help educate all the people out there who are ignorant of the fine art of queueing.

/R

I suppose a queue for a queue-ticket dispenser is another example of a conjoined queue (see my post in "Russian queuing" thread).

I love the idea of queuing for a queue ticket dispenser, this is truly a way to prolong the whole queuing experience. You have to queue twice the joy! Bus stations are ridiculous places to try and form an orderly queue and as a seasoned bus traveller they make my blood boil. Lets all go on holiday in Europe and teach everyone else how to queue