The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
6:31pm on Monday, 2nd May, 2005:
Rant
When I arrived in the USA last week, as always I looked enviously to the short lines where US citizens queued to have their passports examined, while we UK citizens languished in a line 6 times as long that moved about as fast as continental drift.
When I arrived back in the UK today, I had the same feeling. No, I mean the same feeling. The US citizens (or "other", as they are known) went into an ordely line that fenced them into a queue which had 6 immigration officers serving it. UK citizens (or "UK, EU, Swiss and European Economic Area", as we are known) went into an ill-defined stretched blob that went on forever to get through the one immigration officer on duty. While the Americans on our flight breezed through, the only occasion that our line moved was when someone in it realised they qualified for BA's fast-track line so left for that. Eventually, one of the "other" immigration officers switched to our line, probably so the queue would move enough that people could get off their aircraft to join the end.
I've only been in one worse queue, and that was in November 1979 when on a whim I went to Wembley Stadium along with 25,000 other people only to discover that England's European Championship qualifier agains Bulgaria was fogged off — the first time it had happened in 25 years (and it didn't happen again before the stadium was demolished, too). At least Wembley had an excuse.
We may excel at queue technology, but then with queues like ours we need to...
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Copyright © 2005 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).