Do you have any character traits that you know aren’t your best but you can’t really be bothered to try to improve things? That’s me, with waiting in line. I’m a terrible, terrible line-waiter. I become a seething ball of misanthropic feelings that cause me to do things like roll my eyes like a petulant teenager. Plus, for reasons that I will never understand, the places where the lines are held are always too hot or too cold, and someone is always popping their gum. I am so bad at waiting in line, in fact, that I rarely choose to do so, and the only time it ever really comes into play is when I’m travelling, which luckily is a pretty rare event, because I’m fairly certain that Mike spends most of the time we’re in the customs line wondering why he didn’t marry a more patient woman. Every time there is a news story that features a long line-up — a movie premiere, or Black Friday sales, for example — I always think there’s just NO WAY, you know? I don’t know if it’s because of how much I hate waiting around, or if it’s just that I don’t really LIKE anything THAT much, but I can say with some certainty that there is nothing on this earthly plain that I enjoy enough to endure hours and hours in a group of other people waiting for the same thing. The line could have Paul Rudd at the end of it, wearing a suit and planning to feed me cheesecake and read to me from Leonard Cohen’s poetry and tell me my I am smart and my hair is shiny, and the most I’d probably last is about 20 minutes before storming off, huffily muttering “ForGET it!” under my breath.
So my aversion to waiting in line (which is not nearly so sensitive as yours, as long as I have my iPhone or Kindle to occupy me!) has experienced a focus change since moving to Kuwait. It is less my own waiting that causes me severe vein throbbing rage, but those around me who do NOT wait, and in this country it’s nearly everyone. I was patiently waiting in line to order a raspberry vanilla latte at Starbucks, when a woman in full Nikab (abaya, hijab scarf, and veil) waltzed in front of me as I was approaching the counter. I gaped open mouthed at her for the entirety of her transaction, and as she finished paying for her Christmas Mug, I mumbled “Your WELcome” under my breath. This happens on a pretty regular basis, and it hurts my Canadian soul!
On a slightly related note, the other thing that hurts my soul is that there is no recycling. Every time I put a glass container, plastic bottle, or cardboard box in the bin I cringe and die a little inside! My dad would be proud!