I freakin hate the mad scramble in India. It’s a great way for men to fondle you, and they take full advantage!
I am sorry but you are wrong and being romantic about your african and asian experiences. The evolution of the formal rules based practices is something that provides a more level playing field. The europeans were not more organized and more naturally line making, these things were developed only in the most recent decades (or century) for their positive
I have no romanticism about the lack of lines in my countries, or the lack of public civisism in reality. This is a transition and a failure which most heavily penalizes the people who are the most vulnerable and least strong, whatever the romantic cultural arguments that are made by often very blind or self interested people. It is a direct manifestation of the same attitudes that lead to blindness to the corruption and the exploitation of the public for the family or for the clan.
These are not good things, they are not some things that are core to our culture any more than they were core to the europeans who had these same habits a century ago or even now (if you visit Italy you see it). the advancing of this idea is a detriment to our development and confounds some and self interested bad habits for culture. this kind of thinking has and continues to justify the gross exploiters like Mugabe or the other dictators who began with perhaps the good intentions but came to exploit.
I’m not trying to start an argument, because I won’t win. Lines are a relatively fair system, and certainly fairer than the mad scramble.
I guess what I am trying to articulate is that lines aren’t necessarily a perfect, natural, obvious system. They level the playing field in some ways but not in others. The most obvious factor is time- life becomes very different when you can cut out from work a bit early to avoid the rush. And of course enough money anywhere means you aren’t going to have to wait in line. And that works even on low levels- the poor wait in a lot of lines that the middle class doesn’t even think about.
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I guess what I am trying to articulate is that lines aren’t necessarily a perfect, natural, obvious system.
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I do not see a claim that says they are pefect or natural or obvious. Your statements were wrong and the essentialised.
I go to a bank within a Wal-Mart that has windows and no barrier for forming a line, sometimes I encounter lines for each window, sometimes a single line for whatever window opens next (as it should be). Then you go to a U-Scan at Wal-Mart, sometimes there are lines for each of the check stations, sometimes a single line for whichever opens next (as it should be).
I’ve often tried to understand why the line forms this way one day and a different way the next. At the bank, we’re all regular customers that have been there before, usually not tourists or out-of-towners. The people checking out usually aren’t tourists or foreigners, so why do we behave differently at different times?
I’m often befuddled by the person with a loaded shopping cart that tries to race me into a line when I only have a single item or two in hand. I can be in the natural position to make the queue first, but for some reason they are determined to make an attempt to make me wait while their loads of price checks, exotic fruits, coupons and WIC vouchers are processed…is it an attempt to convey the message that they are more important than me? If I have a complicated order or huge cartload, I always offer someone with only a few items the chance to go ahead of me. Doing so will only add a minute or two to my wait, not doing so would add a much larger delay to them.
I would lay odds that they drive the same way. They are the people who, when stuck in a slow moving queue of cars, will absolutely NOT let someone out of a side street, even though it will only cost them a few seconds.
Italy is my example too. I was trying to get a ticket for a ferry. I was first at the ticket window before it opened. Well, I thought I was first. Then the window opened and I was immediately shoved aside by a rugby scrum of old ladies. Being a nice American boy the idea of pushing old ladies around was unfathomable. After standing there like a dork for awhile and watching what everyone else was doing I finally decided if I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in the station, I was going to have to push some old ladies around. I did, as gently as I could and found I had to use some actual force. Very trippy experience.
When I was in Rome I observed they drive exactly the same way.
It seems to me that a big problem with having a mad scramble as your system is that it’s self-perpetuating. When going to buy your ferry tickets or whatever, you either have to take part in the scramble, or you’ll be stuck at the back for the rest of the day. Even if few or none of the scramblers really want to be in the situation they’re in, they’ll all still think of madly scrambling as their best option.
Those little old Italian ladies are stronger than they look, I’ll tell ya that.
Going back to re-read your post, I think I misread it, and I can completely understand where you are coming from. I think you think that I am saying something equivalent to “some countries just aren’t suited to (democracy/lining up/whatever) because of some inherent cultural trait makes people think differntly.” That is inaccurate and dangerous thinking that has done a lot of wrong.
But I don’t know. As soon as someone clued me in to the whole “in-group/out-group” theory when I was in China, living in China immediately stopped making me so darn angry all time. I spent a really good chunk of time generally annoyed that everyone seemed aggressive, unruly, messy, loud, and rude. And the streets in China can be spectacularly aggressive, unruly, messy, loud and rude. But that lens kind of shifted things, and it made a lot more sense. It also made me understand why people reacted with such disdain when I said I was a volunteer. I had a tough time convincing people I hadn’t been sent to China in liu of a prison sentence. This is changing as the nation is coming together after national disasters, but volunteering in an outside community is still considered to be pretty incomprehensible in China. It also brought some light into how you could visit a friend and go up a dirty, trash-filled, decrpeit, unfinished stairwell and hallway only to enter a pristine luxury apartment. IMHO, it’s all about the bounds of what “in” and what’s “out”.
IMHO, I didn’t really see the same dynamic in any of the places I’ve spent time in Africa, but it’s a lot harder to generalize anything about “Africa” given the size and diversity. It probably doesn’t make a lot of sense to generalize China, either, but that observation did help things seem a little less random.
I’ve lived in Asia for half of my live, with 25 of these years in Japan, and almost two more in Taiwan.
Cultures have rather arbitrary distinctions on what constitutes good manners and what doesn’t. While the Japanese excel at lining up and allowing passengers to get off of trains before others board, once they get a seat, no one ever yields said seat for the elderly, handicapped for pregnant women. In Taiwan, there is a constant awareness of newly boarding passengers and people actively offer seats.
In Tokyo, young, able-bodied girls and girls hog handicap seats and don’t notice the pregnant women standing in front of them. It would piss the hell out of my pregnant wife since her culture was for people to be proactive about giving up seats. When my rug rats were smaller, I can’t think of a time I had to stand on a bus or the subway in Taipei. Once, I boarded a bus and there was a 20ish woman engrossed in her smart phone, and failed to notice us. While I couldn’t understand the words, the fact that not only one but several other passengers were giving her a tongue lashing made it obvious that she had committed a major no-no.
There are differences in societies between how people treat “in group” members and outsiders and the danger lies when we judge other cultures by our standards, as put a judgement (i.e., they are rude) when they are not within their culture.
That all said, I hate being pushed in line by Chinese, and push back, pretty hard.
even, while I agree in part, it’s not that simple.
I came in to post exactly this! All the details are right as well.
It’s interesting as hell.
I’d partially qualify this, at least as far as the tube is concerned. (Though I saw a rather elaborate bus queue formed on Marylebone Road just yesterday.)
The crucial factor is neither frequency nor tourists. It’s the ability to predict where the doors are going to be. Outside of rush hour, at most stations the majority of people waiting to get on trains - a minority of whom are usually ever tourists - are just not routinely intimate with that station. So they don’t know where the doors are likely to be. A queue just can’t form because they just don’t know what they’re queuing for.
Those conditions however aren’t really true during rush hour. Most regular commuters do know where the doors are meant to be and arrange themselves accordingly. The snag is that, while the train drivers have an exact mark to hit, they can easily be out by a metre or two. It’s thus hit or miss whether your correctly chosen optimal position actually gets you on first. It’s a bit “okay, you turned up after me, but happened to get the spot where the doors were. We both know that. Get on and let me on after you.”
What is absolute amongst the locals is always letting others off first. As someone whose commute in the last year or so has involved a couple of stations that have heavy tourist traffic, this is an obvious signifier. Tourists just barge on, while commuters always let people off first. (Idiots who’ve sat through the station announcement and only then belatedly jumped to their feet as they realise they have to get off are obviously excepted.)
Where all this is abundantly obvious is on the Jubilee line extension. Opened in the late Nineties, its stations have suicide prevention barriers down all platforms. With doors opening to match those on the trains. Invariably, locals form queues at these doors - typically one on either side of the double ones, one for the single ones. Deliberately giving space for passengers to get off. At evening rush hour at Canary Wharf such queues can easily be a couple of dozen people deep. An unenforced, purely social phenomenon.
The British public will thus automatically form queues for the tube. If we know where to stand.
I haven’t noticed that London train stations were any better or worse for queueing than Toronto train stations (whether that reflects well or poorly on London is debatable). But I was very impressed by Tokyo train stations.
Two lines is pretty good, but Tokyo train stations often have three parallel lines at once: one for the 10:00 train, one for the 10:15 train, and one for the 10:30 train, for instance.
My dad used to work for AAFES, a company which runs department stores, gas stations, restaurants, etc. on Army and Air Force bases. He mentioned a few years back how there were stories of people being shot or trampled at Wal Mart on Black Friday, and on the same day they had a huge mass of people waiting to get into the PX at Fort Huachuca when one of the employees unlocks the front door, walks outside, and loudly asks everyone to form a single file line around the building before entering.
The large crowd of military personnel decided that sounded like a pretty keen idea, and proceeded to form an orderly line around the building. The US military is pretty good at lining up on command, a skill we picked up from fighting the British in the late 1700s.
How about the opposite of a line? An avoidance pile. All the penguins line up to the edge of the ice but no one wants to be the first one to jump in.
I guess such things are just form organically, so to speak, from the situation.