[ExI] abandoning hope - the queuing experience

[Amara Graps]

"Spike" <spike66 at att.net>:
>Ja. But the art of queuing should break down.  If there are many customers
>in line anywhere, the merchant needs to open additional registers.  If they
>haven't enough proles working the registers to keep the lines short, the
>customers will take their trade elsewhere, as they should.


Oh ye of little imagination, Spike! Queuing is much more than waiting in
the lines in the bank or at the supermarket. Italy's present
infrastructure has raised the queuing experience to a superb art form.

The most important queue that you'll learn about are the phone queues
for the governmental public services: police, customs, post offices, tax
office, airport lost luggage, taxis (!), ... I'm sure that they've
programmed their phone system so that you get a busy signal in the first
several times. Just when you've just set the speed re-dial on your phone
to keep trying, then you'll hear that same number only ring and ring and
no one answers. Now multiply that for several phone numbers which lead
into the same office. My workplace secretary and I lost 4 days in this
process, trying to locate real people at the Milan Italian customs
office, who were sitting on the box with my computer inside which I
desperately needed to do my job. On another occasion, I spent two days
in this procedure trying to get a status on my lost luggage which
contained materials that I needed to give a talk at a conference in
the next days.

Real line queues for governmental offices are designed to bring you back
to the same window multiple times initially, because those
offices/windows are only open two or three hours a day. It's not over
yet though, because usually there is a second or third office that you
need to visit next, also open two or three hours a day, or not at all for
some period, because the one clerk that knows that job is on holiday.

Another interesting queue can be seen at the Rome Termini train station.
There are 30 TV monitors scattered throughout the train station, all
showing simultaneously the same perfume advertisement, but only 3 large
displays for giving train timetable information. So in order to know on
which track your train leaves, you're in the center of the station in
front of one of those large displays. However, some trains, such as the
unimportant Rome Fiumicino airport train, leave from tracks that are at
least 400 meters away from the display which gives the  timetable
information. Moreover, the timetable information for the track number is
often given only 5 to 10 minutes before the train leaves. Here we see
the classic Italian phenomena: "Wait and Hurry Up".

The Fiumicino train is not the only artful queue in the vicinity of Rome
Fiumicino airport, the luggage coming off of the planes in the baggage
area is another fine example. You can usually find on which carousel
your luggage will appear, but if there are more planes than the eight
rows on the TV monitor, then it's off the display. The time you'll need
to wait is about 40 minutes anyway, so you might as well hang around
that little TV screen and wait until your desired row on the TV finally
appears. Then when you've arrived at the carousel to wait for your
luggage, your luggage is actually emerging on a different carousel.

Before we leave the airport, one last queue I should mention is the one
that develops when the computers that are used to tag luggage with their
airport routing information go down. The solution from the counter personnel
is to handwrite the routing information on sticky white pieces of paper.
You can now guess at the result. The result is that everyone on this
flight during the time that the computers went down did not receive
their luggage at their final destination.

Next, let's go to the post office. Post offices in Italy are not usually
used to mail things, they are used instead to pay one's bills. So there
are several (hopefully) open windows with clerks ready to take your
money for your electricity bill, and always just one window available to
mail your letters. I suppose that the some (or many) of some (or many)
Italians' innate drive to pile up at the front of a queue prompted some
persons to initiate a new queuing system a few years ago, however I'm
not sure that post offices are the appropriate place where such systems
are needed. I think that such training could be better used at car
traffic lights, where the front of the line of cars waiting to turn left
always contains two or more cars gunning their engine to make the break
across the intersection when the light changes, even if that lane can
fit only one-half of a car.

The post office queuing system begins when you punch a button at a
wobbly lime-green machine near the front of the office to receive a
number. Then the customer waits and looks at an LED display in the
corner of the post office which list window numbers and queuing ticket
numbers to guide you to the proper window in an orderly fashion. However,
the time at the post office remains the same because the same queue is
only rearranged, not shortened in any way, which is one way to
experience the old adage: "Tutto deve cambiare perchè nulla cambi"
(everything must change so that nothing will truly change)

And sometimes the post office clerks are new or in a particularly perky
mood that day. He might sit there pushing the button increasing the
queuing number for the window, but it has no correspondence with any
customer or window. He's just having a bit of fun, you see, and why
wouldn't you? Being a postal clerk is a boring job. Your queuing
experience doesn't end there, though. When you arrive at the window
to pick up your package, then you can bet that they will not be able
to find your package and you will need to return to the post office
one or two more times.

Now while the above queues are frustrating and cold-hearted, the queue
at one's local medico office is designed to bring out the best of
Italy's warm and cozy culture. There are no electronic queuing systems.
Instead when you enter a waiting room, the first thing you must ask is
'ultima persona?'. Once you know who is the last person in the queue of
people in that waiting room, then your task for the next hour is simply
to be fixated on that person; when he/she sees the doctor, then you know
that you are next. You see in this way, you immediately make a friend in
the waiting room, and more likely, you will have more attention to give
to the other people in the room, as well. So usually everyone in the room
are almost like family by the end of the hour.

So here I've given you just a small sample of the many creative ways
that queuing works in Italy. I hope that you're suitably enlightened
now.

Ciao,
Amara