Tangents
Our Lines, <i>Their Lines </i>
A break from waiting in line. Photo: Ihtisham Kabir
In the early days of my return to Bangladesh after living abroad for many years, an experience at Dhaka airport jolted me. I had queued to check-in for an international flight. Just when my turn came, another man behind me, assisted by an airline employee, cut in front of me. I decided to be patient and overlook the incident. But then I lost my patience because the queue-jumper started a lengthy argument with the airline agent, demanding to a business class seat for his economy class ticket. After I complained loudly, another airline staff helped me swiftly. The event left a deep impression on me. Lines represented one of the most vexing problems I faced those days. My years in the US had trained me to respect the sanctity of lines. If you waited, your turn would come, fair and square. But here it was not so simple. If you waited in line like a good boy, sometimes people took you for a fool. It is a vicious circle. The more insecure people become, the less they respect lines. To be sure, people here line up everywhere: offices, embassies, banks, schools, buses, museums, clinics, toll booths, even the Boi Mela. Yet people also cut into all these lines. For example, every time my car stops at the Bhairab Bridge toll booth, two or three CNGs sneak from behind into the front of the line. Lines are frustrating for Americans, too, but for a different reason. They hate the time spent doing nothing, but queue-jumpers are rare. According to a recent article in the New York Times, Americans spend an average of 170 billion hours every year waiting in line. That sounds like a large number, but if you calculate anything that 300 million people do for one year, it will be large. Dhaka's twenty million people spend 29 billion hours in traffic jams annually, assuming four hours daily per person. When I lived in the US, my frustrations with lines centred mostly on their length. For example, the lines at the Department of Motor Vehicles (car-related papers) or Costco stores were the worst because I felt the time spent was too long for the task I accomplished. Here the frustrations are different. The first is the aforementioned queue-jumper. Thankfully, I have found that in many places, my long arms can reach over the head of others. Using my body and elbows as shields also helps. However, the most frustrating line is the one where I wait for hours only to find when my turn comes that it is the wrong line, that the instructions were misleading, and that many others have also suffered. This happened to me recently in an otherwise well-run government office. Entrepreneurs turn those interminable lines into business opportunities. In the US, supermarkets encourage impulse buying by customers waiting in line to pay for groceries. Here, the savvy newspaper- or cigarette-seller eagerly sells to people waiting in line. But the nagging thought remains: does our behaviour in lines indicate how civilised we are as a people?
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