Queue rage/What is it? You've been standing in the supermarket "express lane" for 20 minutes and are the second-but-one person to be served when a well-dressed woman of a certain age asks whether this is the queue.
You say that it is - and before you can say over-ripe avocados she nips in front of you and starts unloading her basket. You don't want to cause a scene, so you just try to burn a hole with your eyes in the back of her skull while she pulls her headscarf tighter around her in a perfect study of blissful ignorance. You tut and ahem for a while, then say: "Excuse me, but I was in front of you." She says: "Well, you didn't look like you were standing in the queue." Then you notice she has more than the legal eight-item maximum in her basket. You don't remember much after that, but you are told that security had to be called.
The symptoms? You've developed an allergy to Paddy O'Gorman and queues. Queues, any queues, bring you out in a rash, such as: at the taxi rank, where nobody ever seems to move forward, although when you do they don't follow, creating a breakaway queue behind, which confuses the drivers; at the cinema, where, when the people in front of you eventually get to the cash desk, they are never in a rush to pay and have to dig for ages in their handbag or rucksack for their money, credit card or identification; at the posh deli, where you wait in line for exactly 35 minutes to pay for a couple of organic oranges and an almond tart; at the supermarket, where you've noticed the insidious development of people lining up beside each other. In fact, parallel queuing makes you very angry indeed. When you suggest a family shopping trip nobody wants to go. You wonder why.
The cure? Shop on the Internet or call up managers of offending emporiums with your foolproof plan for person-specific queuing. Suggest a queue for little old ladies. A queue for families. A queue for really slow people who never get their money out in time and a queue for clever and quick people like you, who then get a discount on certain products for spending 30 seconds or less at the counter. Of course, your calls to the managers may be placed in a queue . . .
What annoys you most? Share it with us by e-mailing rage@irish-times.ie
