Queuing- what’s the story behind it?
As an Irish person there are some specific aspects of our beloved neighbours in Britain that seem very strange to me - not necessarily indicative of a broader strangeness but still very odd- like for example the imperative to organise people standing in a queue- I was at a work event in London recently and there were multiple people from the organisers employed simply to direct and organise how we queued up to register.
In Ireland people would just have spread out in a slightly haphazard fashion and approached the registration desk in an order that closely resembled the sequence in which they had originally arrived and everyone would have gotten looked after in due course.
In England it was apparently critically important that we all stood in double file and squashed up under the careful and highly technical direction of the organisers in an orderly and regimented fashion.
Edit- It has been an interesting discussion notwithstanding how negatively it has for some reason been received by some Brits (judging by the large number of downvotes).
And to clarify … there already was a queue. A perfectly orderly queue. I get queues.
Irish and British people queue similarly and respect the need to allow people who arrived ahead of you be attended to before you- except as I noted below in a busy pub in Ireland where getting served quickly is a bit of lottery- understand queuing at a bar is the social etiquette in the UK these days.
I understand and totally respect why they are necessary. It was the need for an army of queue managers to totally reorganise and marshal where everyone was standing in the already existing and very olderly queue like we were all about to parade in front of President Xi JinPing on May Day- that’s the bit I didn’t understand.
It just kind of baffled me (sincerely) and I wanted to explore it a little bit- I’m grateful for the engagement and responses- it probably points to the fact that despite many obvious things in common, Irish and British people have some significant but quite subtle differences.
And I’d probably have the view that the “average” level of manners is probably slightly higher in Britain than in Ireland without Irish people being particularly rude or lacking in manners either.