The Waiting Game

Today I understood the Ukrainian (and Russian) queueing system. To the untrained eye a Ukrainian/Russian queue may look nothing like a queue and more like a mass of people milling around. That's where you're wrong.

I was at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with a Russian friend who of course knows how to work queues Russian stylie. The first thing you do when you approach this mass of people and you can't work out where to join the queue, is ask кто павледнии? (Kto Pasledni) which literally means "Who's last?" That's when a whole bunch of people will turn around and tell you who's in front of them. So you might have the one person standing in a queue but the person in front of him may be on the other side of the room, taking a break, sitting down or generally not feeling like hanging out in a queue.

People in queues have to wait forever by the way. I'm not quite why, but that's how it works and then just before closing time, there's a flurry of activity when 2 people manage to get whatever it is they wanted and the rest have to go home and come back and repeat the process the following day. But more on that another time.

So once you work out where the end of the queue, you have your place. Waiting goes on forever so there's plenty of conversation with the people around you. The only downside is you don't really know how many people are in front of you. You may see only 10 people in front of you and 30 standing around. So you don't know how many of the 30 are part of the queue. And there you were thinking you'd be done in half an hour. Hah!! Try again!!

I spent 3 hours and 15 minutes in a queue today and didn't get anything done. I didn't even manage to get to the counter to ask my question. That's all I wanted - an answer to a question!