After a full week without power in the countryside, I decided that I would use my dead electronics as motivation to deposit the loose cash I’d been holding onto into my bank account. On Saturday afternoon, I drove to the ATM near me, and stood in a sizeable queue. 

It was crowded, it was hot, and it was slow. Every 5 minutes, we would shuffle a quarter of a meter forward, redundantly. I, standing behind a man in a blue t-shirt, kept checking my watch restlessly like some kind of woman of importance but actually just trying not to look lost. Sometimes it takes a lot to believe in my reasoning for my presence in any public space. So there, I performed significance. 

I may not have been very believable, because a woman and her baby appeared confidently in the nook between me and the man in the blue t-shirt. A bit of smoke must’ve escaped between my space buns, I wasn’t about to let someone just cut in front of me. I tried so hard, but failed to care that she had a baby in her arms. I intended on keeping my space. 

So when the man in the blue t-shirt shuffled forward, I quickly followed behind in order to evade the baby lady’s attempt at self-insertion into our already established order. 

She followed next to me then mumbled something to me under her mask a few seconds later. She made a gesture towards the man in the blue t-shirt which made me believe that she was with him. I asked anyway, just to be sure, “Are you with him?”

She said, “Yes”. 

I felt a bit silly. I just tried to separate a family. I was officially the Donald Trump of ATM queues. 

The queue continued to move and I began to doubt the baby lady. The man in the blue t-shirt had not turned around to acknowledge his family a single time since she appeared. Had she lied to me in order to advance the queue under false pretences? Even if she had, what could I have possibly done? 

I wouldn’t see myself as particularly bureaucratic, but it begged the question about queue etiquette. What is our responsibility as citizens of society?

Unspoken Queue Rules:

1. Every queue is to be joined from the back
2. A person in the front or middle of the queue cannot introduce a new queue member into the space in front of the, or behind them. Only the person at the very end of the queue can do this. 

Because these rules are mostly unspoken, the enforcement of these rules and the consequences of breaking them are also vague. The most I’ve seen is a public shaming at Beitbridge when a short man tried to cut the immigration queue. Anyone with common sense knows not to try and cut the queue at the boarder, because that is how scenes of a ruthless nature are born. 

The fact that I am so insistent on the respect of queue etiquette may be evidence that my fixation on this moment of betrayal has become reflection of my pettiness. A part of maturity is the ability to maintain a level-head when the behaviour of others insults you? Or is maturity being able to stand up for yourself when people try to take advantage of you? 

What do you think?