[queues] and the problem of the chicken

The really wonderful thing about walking the half mile home from the market along hard-packed snow paths is that the chicken you're carrying in your hands because the woman didn't have any packets today, is going to freeze up in the minus 12, thereby saving you the job at home.

Wonderful day.

One of my clients dropped me at the phone company office to pay an overdue bill they'd never given me and had then sent the computerized voice to intimidate me that if I didn't pay up by yesterday they'd cut me off - but the office was closed.

Their "pyeryeriv" or lunch break is 12-13 but just to fool us this month, they'd made it into 13-14 and of course, I'd been dropped there at 13:05. This necessitated the aforementioned walk home but as it went past the post office, I thought oh well, might as well pay that. Good thing I did go in then because they'd also changed their 13-14 break to 14-15 and there were arguments with the cashier serving the line I was in.

Interesting study in human nature over here.

There are most certainly queues and the usual thing is to ask: "Kto poslyedni?" or "Who's last?" then join the queue in turn. There is another tradition that if you've once joined the queue and looked the person behind you in the eyes, then you can go somewhere else in the room and sit down until your turn comes.

This means that if you walk into the post office with a half frozen chicken and there's a queue of, say, twelve people [remarkably small], then it is, in fact, thirty six people from assorted points in the room. Into this comes the type who tries it on. The most brazen simply walk straight to the cashier, muscle into a gap two places back in the queue and act as if nothing's happened. These are usually but not always men.

Then there is the woman who comes straight to the window, gives an apologetic quick glance at the queue, asks an innocuous question, then another, whilst the cashier is in the process of serving the current customer and with the cashier not answering her, she mutters: "Nu, ladno," which roughly translates as:

"Well, I asked a reasonable question but if you don't want to answer because you're just a rude post office worker, then all the people I've just queue jumped will join me in my general disdain for you."

The queue now shuffles one place closer and this woman softly slips into a parallel sort of joining the queue. On being told by the cashier to get to the bloody back of the queue like everyone else has had to, she steps away with an apologetic look, then when the cashier looks down, she rejoins the queue again.

This is where a kalashnikov would come in handy.

Or the other type who simply comes up to the window, stands beside the person being served and starts her business with the cashier, irrespective of the person at the window being served. Can't help thinking what would happen to such a person in Britain but here she gets away with it and this is one of the more galling things.

The other thought crossing the mind is whether or not to waste a perfectly good, almost re-thawed chicken by flinging it at the woman's face. Anyway, my turn comes and then it's time to walk back down to the telephone company office again, where the whole queue business repeats itself once more.

Then comes the walk home again.

The bright side, of course, is the exercise and the rich tapestry of human nature one observes every time one steps outside the door of one's flat.