The case for... Queuing

Having previously in this very column lauded automated checkouts, it seems only fair to raise a glass to their opposite. Around once a week I end up at the post office, sending out parcels and books to various people, specifically those I’m trying to bribe via cynically deployed personalised dedications. 

This process always involves around 20 minutes of queuing, since the small old man who works behind the counter appears to have been abducted, without his foreknowledge or consent, from pre-modern Britain. I imagine his name is Wylfgærd, and I love him because he conducts all his labours with the bemused alarm of someone who woke up flying a plane.

Show him a QR code and you can actually see him fighting the urge to attack it with a carefully worked stone tool, before looking at it, putting it down, looking at it again, and hesitantly reaching for the very same laser gun that has beeped it into his system the last 14,000 times.

I don’t mind. Queuing in the post office is time to myself. Time to stop, to think, to contemplate. And, joy of joys, time to people-watch. There may be no brighter spot in my week than standing behind four people as they attempt, one by one, to get Wylfgærd’s attention, before slowly shepherding him through the process of recognising what a parcel is, and how it works. How, perhaps, it may be different from a letter or a box. It’s a period of humbling, of enforced and immobile attention where we, and time itself, must stand still. 

Until, of course, it’s my turn. And my package. And my QR code. Yes, a QR code. Beep it with the laser gun, yes. At the other end. No, the laser gun, OK you’ve turned it upside down now, can you just…