I’m coming back from Europe, early morning flight. Myself and one hundred other people. We’re leaving Barcelona at six, which means we’ve been up since three. We got to bed at midnight. Tempers are short on those that are conscious enough—after one of the worst airlines in the world—Alitalia—we still have jetlag and work to look forward to. Fun times.
Me being one of the responsible members of this trip, I’m at the back of the line, making sure everyone ahead of me gets through. There’s a single checkout counter operating, its clerk looking like he’s suffering from the revelries after last night’s Barcelona Football Club victory.
We’re not the only people flying to Rome this morning, though—we’re just the earliest. Soon, a line of another seventy or eighty people has formed behind us. None of them look pleased. They thought they’d given themselves plenty of time to get on this flight, now they see one hundred people who have to be processed before them.
My Spanish is passable enough—particularly my trucker vernacular—to gauge the extent of their collective displeasure.
I’m standing with another of the more responsible members of our group. He and I are discussing the speed of this line-up, and our own helplessness to do anything about it. We shrug. It is what it is.
A national, a young well-dressed Spaniard, his sweater tied about his shoulders, enters the main doors and assesses the line before him. He decides this is not for him and he proceeds to where I’m standing, right where the queue enters the mouse’s maze of ropeworks that allow a giant line to be folded upon itself leading up to the twenty check-in desks, one operating. Without looking at us, he edges between me and the other chaperone. We take exception.
“Excuse me,” I say, in English. “You trying to get in the line?”
“Si,” he says, beaming. I understand his dilemma.
“It starts there.” I point eighty people away to the line’s rear, ten feet from the door he entered.
He points to our group with an “Aw, c’mon” gesture.
“Forget it,” says my companion. “We’re not letting you ahead of any of these other people.”
A nod of approval from those behind us. No freebies, fella.
His face grows dark. He curses in Spanish, then turns abruptly, dragging his designer suitcase behind him.
“Thank you,” he spits over his shoulder.
“Nice sweater,” I send back.
The moral of this tale is not “The nerve of some people.” It’s “Why do we care?” We all made the flight, we all transferred in Rome. Mr. Sweater had several opportunities to glare at me and become angrier when I grinned back.
Is this sort of behaviour worth it? Is the queue such an icon of order that to mess with it is to throw all of society off balance?
I didn’t not let him in because of the people behind me. I didn’t let him in because he had the nerve to try to budge. Seriously, what were we trying to get to? A check-in counter followed by a wait followed by a gate—where more people tried to budge, incidentally.
Chalk it up to culture? No, despite their reputation, the Spanish are no ruder than the rest of us, they understand line-ups just as well.
We feel the need to crusade. He was rude, I was rude. We feel the need to stand up to each other in the most pointless situations. Guaranteed that guy mentioned to whoever he was meeting in Rome or wherever he went on to the jerk he ran into in Barcelona. Hell, he struck me enough to blog about him.
Do us any good? Nope.
What would’ve happened if I’d let him in? I’d have been behind one more person. Until everyone behind me saw me as the way in.
And would that have mattered? We all made the flight.
We put up a fight for the dumbest reasons.
