Janet CollinsWithout a Queue
April 27th 2009 22:48
Where would we be without the queue?
If there is one thing that has promoted courteous behaviour over the last few decades it is the almost blanket adoption of the queue. I do say almost but I am often surprised at how people have come to accept that they have to wait in line.
It is nowhere more obvious than my local bus stop. To accommodate the ever increasing number of people catching buses to work and elsewhere, many bus stops out my way have adopted queuing to quell any arguments over who gets on first.
I doubt that this system has been adopted all over Sydney but my bus stop is a pretty popular pick up point and therefore there are more people at the stop than can fit onto any one bus a lot of the time, especially in peak hour.
Banks are another example of services that have improved the way we queue. We may all criticise them for just about everything else but they generally try to make things more orderly these days.
The single line is a large improvement on the individual queues for each teller. I can remember time and time again being stuck behind someone who had a lengthy transaction and watching an opposite queue move swiftly through. It was enough to make my blood boil at times. They eventually, like many other organisations, have learned to organise a single queue so as to make service more customer friendly.
So too have places like Medicare and the RTA made it so easy we only need to take a ticket and wait for a number to be called. No-one even needs to actually stand in a queue for service.
There are other queues that cause constant frustration. Think about waiting on a telephone queue for some customer service. That one often is designed to raise our temperature if anything can.
I had an experience only today where I waited and waited and was put through to “someone who could help me”. I must have spent five minutes telling this person all my personal information so she could verify I was who I said I was, only to be put through to another section that had a recorded message saying there were too many calls and to ring back later.
My second call was a lot less polite but it was hardly the fault of the person at the other end of the phone but rather the management. It is situations like these that call for some sort of organisation.
It is this type of queuing that needs serious revamp. We have become accustomed queuing for so much else in recent years. To aid crowd control at sporting events and concerts - all those gates that force us to walk around S-bends for a long way just prevent any queue jumping - and everyone just accepts it but the invisible queues on the telephone just seem to get worse.
I accept that there are a lot of situations where a queue cannot be organised. Train stations are one where there are so many entry points it makes it near impossible to organise.
They often say queuing is inherited from our British ancestors who have always accepted waiting in line as normal and everyday as anything else. Having said this, queuing for everything has not always been as much a part of our culture as it is now.
There were some interesting studies done on queuing not so long ago by a behavioural economist, David Savage, at the Queensland University of Technology. Savage’s research covered four 20th century maritime disasters, one of which was the sinking of the Titanic.
Savage concluded that British passengers on the Titanic died in disproportionate numbers on the voyage because they queued politely for lifeboats. Americans, he believes, elbowed their way on to the lifeboats leaving many Britons behind.
While most of our everyday lives are never really life or death situations, the culture of queuing often triggers a lot of debate. I, for one, would think that some of our organisations could get their act together and organise things just a little bit better.
Phone queues are a pain and can be very costly if you are calling from a mobile phone. There must be some better way.
sourced: www.independent.co.uk
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