This nearly makes it into The Ranting Category, but I'm going to make an effort to be restrained and reflective. A thing I've noticed about people and queues is that, whenever they're queing for something they like to orient themselves so that they're facing the thing they're queuing for, and it's quite hard to persuade them to do otherwise. The prime example is cash machines - take a walk down Oxford Street any Saturday, fairly busy, people bustling up and down the street. Let me stress here - people bustle up and down the steet, bustling across the street tends to be far less common than people using the pavement to get from one end of Oxford Street to the other (diving into shops along the way). There are several cash machines along Oxford Street and it is quite common for someone to already be using one when you walk up, now when this happens the person waiting to use the machine ignores the fact that he's standing in the flow of pedestrian traffic on one of the busiest streets in England and stands directly behind the person already using the machine, facing towards it. The next person to come along repeats this and stands directly behind the person in front so that, gradually, a human wall builds up across the pavement. What amazes me is that people don't even think this is strange, in fact when I've queued to the side of a cash machine alongside the wall I often find that the person who joins the queue behind me will stand far enough away from the wall to be able to see the cash machine, and since I'm a fairly large person this can end up being quite a long way from the wall. And not just with cash machines, ticket machines at stations, hot dog stands, anything. So I wonder, do humans have some basic instinct that requires them always to be facing the thing they're queuing for, or do they just care so little about everyone else trying to use the street around them?
