HEALTH PLUS:Queuing creates an unnatural order, and when someone skips ahead, feelings of resentment abound
THE CONCEPT of queuing seems alien to certain cultures. This is experienced starkly when holidaying abroad.
To wait with companions in an orderly fashion for a flight desk to open, to ascend a bus, to buy a train ticket, or check in at a hotel, only to find that others push ahead stirs a particular kind of grievance.
It is a distinctive anger. It is the anger we feel when injustice is done. It is the anger we feel when things are unfair.
But it is more than that, for life is often inadvertently unfair. What makes us angry when people jump the queue is that it is not accidental. It is the arrogance of those who see themselves as entitled to shove ahead of those who wait that incenses us. It is because what they do is deliberate. It is aggressive.
It conveys prerogative and unearned privilege. It suggests superiority. That is why ripples of anger and agitation make their way along the queue like a Mexican wave.
And therein lies the psychology of the thing. We accept that we may not get what we want or may have to wait for what we wish to have. We know that circumstances may go against us.
But a stranger should not appear and blatantly, unashamedly, step in front of us, skip the queue before our very eyes, our open mouths and our suppressed rage. We do not expect people to be rude and we resent it when they are.
Watching a queue as someone skips it is a sight to behold. First there is observation of the perpetrators passing by. Eyes follow and conversations stall as their progress is monitored.
Suspicion is heightened that they intend to skip ahead, which, if followed by confirmation, evokes a curious mix of incredulity at their audacity, and helplessness that there are only seconds left in which to stop them.
There is uncertainty about who should confront them. Should those at the top of the queue, or someone in officialdom, send them back? Skipping the queue happens in seconds, but it sours the day because it has greater psychological meaning than we may realise when it occurs.
In fact, queuing has its own psychology, regardless of whether the queue is jumped. Research shows that queuing creates anxiety, irrational fear and inexplicable anger at being degraded in this way, particularly if people are left without information on how long they must wait and why.
When there are several lines to choose from, anxiety is heightened by the belief that one has chosen the wrong queue, while queue-hopping inevitably ends with the queue one has departed suddenly moving swiftly ahead of the one just joined.
There is resentment if late arrivals to another line are served first. There is annoyance at the customer who takes inordinate time, who rummages for money or insists on counting out change.
Of course there are some circumstances in which we will permit priority. We do not resent those who travel first class and pay for that privilege. They do not usurp our rights.
Nor do we resent those who have physical challenges going first, for we know that they have already been disadvantaged and so should be advantaged as often as they can be.
We do not even mind if someone seeks to go ahead if they ask our permission, explain their plight and apologise as they take our place.
We do not mind because they empower us to acquiesce to their request in a situation in which power and dignity are essentially removed.
And this is what is interesting about queuing: research has long identified that it is inherently a demoralising activity.
It puts people literally and metaphorically in their place. Control is removed, as is the possibility of complaint because one cannot risk losing one's place to go to the top and complain.
Queue-jumping evokes all the primitive rage dormant within us at every unfair act ever perpetrated against us because someone thought they were bigger, better or more entitled to get what they wanted by shoving us aside.
It resonates with every time in our lives that we were abandoned, pushed back, left waiting, overlooked, dismissed or denied what was our right.
That is why we need to consider carefully what we queue for, if the stress of queuing is worth it or how we can confer dignity on ourselves when we do, perhaps by engaging in productive activity such as watching our own and others' behaviour when we queue.
• Clinical psychologist and author Marie Murray is director of the Student Counselling Services at University College Dublin