In and out - navigating the public loo

Whoever designs public toilets needs to rethink the whole thing. Since the advent of the enormous toilet paper dispensers which hold enough paper to last into the forseeable future, there is no room to enter or exit the cubicle. The square meterage of cubicles has also shrunk, both lengthwise and widthwise. Add a container for the disposal of, ahem, ladies' sanitary items, a handbag and your Christmas shopping, there's barely room for a person. This is further compounded by a lack of hooks for hanging one's luggage. At Flinders Street station, this is a diabolical problem, as the floors are unclean and often wet - I hate to think with what. Once the door swings open, there's barely 2 cm between the edge of the door and the the lip of the loo. The space to stand so the swinging door doesn't knock you into the actual toilet, is taken up with the toilet paper dispenser. Getting in, it's a matter of slinging the bags over the shoulder and performing a physical origami act that would make a circus contortionist rethink their vocation. This results in being wedged between the toilet pedestal, the back wall and the lifetime supply of toilet paper. The door can then be flung towards the locking position, but arms are never long enough to reach the lock from there, so the bags are thrown, quoit-like, at the door in the hope that there is a) a hook on the door,  b) that the target will be hit and c)  that said hook will hold. The momentum keeps the door travelling the right direction, giving sufficient time to step over the bowl to the other side of the cubicle so the door can be locked.

Having undertaken the relaxing business of answering nature's call, the logistical challenge of ejecting oneself from this cell of complexity looms. The challenge is all about order. Standing up results in injuries to the face as the bags hanging on the back of the door make contact. Leaning up to try to dislodge the bags before fully standing results in considerable pain from the dislocated shoulder which follows. There's also the risk that the windmill action required could result in the bags flying over one's head and plunging to their watery death. Once that bit is worked out, the entry process is engineered in reverse: wedging in behind the toilet and the dispenser while trying to reach the lock on the door. If one can manage to open the door from this angle, then the ridiculousness of the situation is on display for all to see. And there will be plenty to see it because no matter where or when, there is ALWAYS a queue in the women's  toilets. Everyone pretends not to notice, but really they're dreading the feat that awaits them. Not only does all of the above have to be accomplished, it must be done under pressure of time - there are ladies queuing - but it must be achieved with a full bladder!

Who the hell designed these?

Open the doors outwards!

You must want this - because we're telling you you do!

On my way home this evening I walked past the H & M store which opened in Melbourne's old GPO building in Bourke Street on Saturday. Until this week, I had never heard of H & M. Apparently they are a Swedish clothing retailer and we're supposed to be beside ourselves with excitement.

By the middle of last week, builders were putting the final touches to the building and installing red carpets, velvet ropes, spotlights and marquees. There was also a huge digital clock counting down the very seconds until our deprivation would be ended and Melbourne would have the only H & M store in Australia. I watched as two young women shooed the fifty-year old male security guard behind a pillar so they could take photographs of the front entry (before the store opened). A whippet thin, spray tanned PR blond standing nearby smirked as she tried to operate her phone with her stupidly long fake fingernails.

Since the opening on Saturday, people have been queuing for hours to gain entry. To a shop. That's right, people have been lining up for hours so they can go into a shop. If it was World War II and we were in Leningrad, then this might be appropriate if the shop was a bakery or supermarket, but it isn't. Presumably all of the merchandise inside the shop is only a click away from the comfort of bed if your ipad is handy. Amongst all the groaning about the demise of bricks and mortar retailers, the hype seems ridiculous.

On Saturday there was a DJ inside Flinders Street Station. That was nice, but it didn't inspire me to go and stand in a line for hours. Banners at Southern Cross Station told me that the moment I'd been waiting for had arrived!

I wonder what it's like inside and whether there are crowds of people and the restriction of numbers is just to keep the queue in place, with the double effect of scarcity and desirability sending the message that everyone needs to be there.

A quick look at their website suggests that it's Swedish Target or Big W. I suppose that's handy, but it's not enough for me to stand in a line for hours. I would have trouble doing this for the Leningrad Bakery, I'm certainly not doing it now.

The last time I queued was Expo 88 in Brisbane. The whole city learned how to queue for hours at Expo. It was so well-organised and there was passing entertainment, that you didn't mind. You knew that it was only going to be there for 6 months, so there was a now or never aspect to it. Word got out very quickly about what was worth queuing for and logically, the places that were worth the wait always had a wait. I haven't heard that H & M is a pop up shop and will be gone soon. I can just wait until the day I can just walk in the door. I expect to be as underwhelmed as I was when Zara opened at the other end of the mall.

I wonder how long the velvet ropes and security guards will last? Have you been to H & M? What's it like? What are you willing to queue for?

Queue anxiety - when you play outside the rules

I like the sleek new post offices. Australia Post has been thoughtful in aligning the design of their retail outlets to the focus of their offerings to customers. There's an efficient but friendly vibe, even if the queuing direction is a little unstructured.

Personally, I'm happy without structure, but yesterday when I went to the post office to buy a parcel satchel, I met a fellow customer who craves structure.

It was about 5:15pm, and there were three service spots open at the counter. The staff there were all attending to customers; there were two people waiting when I joined the queue behind them. Soon there were other people behind me. The staff were dealing with people smoothly and soon I was at the front of the queue. Because of the loose organisation of furniture to give structure to the queue, I stayed standing where I was because I was right in front of the staff providing service and would only need to take two steps forward when called.

I could feel the anxiety of the person behind me rise, when I did not move the way she thought I should. She moved in front of me and stood where she thought the head of the queue was. The other people behind me remained where they were. I said nothing, intending to step forward when called. I had no reason to assume she was actually (gasp) pushing in.

A staff member called the next person forward and the anxious woman stepped forward.

"Hello. I'm next," I said to her and the staff member.

"Oh, yes, yes, I know. Yes, but you weren't in the queue," she contradicted herself in a flurry of nervousness.

"Yes I am. You were behind me in the queue," I replied.

"Yes. I know. But you hadn't moved up and I just thought..." she trailed off. I imagine she heard the contradiction of her argument in her own ears and decided it was best to be quiet.

I paid for my satchel and as I left, the woman was being served.

I wonder what was going on for her? I've noticed the same level of anxiety in queues at places like the airport. Everyone is standing too closely and so when the person and their luggage in front moves forward, I tend to stay where I am, only moving forward when it's "worth it". I'm the same when I'm driving. What's the point of moving a millimetre forward? I thought I was going to be rear-ended on the weekend when I made the decision not to go through an orange light when I saw the number of cars queued on the other side of the intersection. I actually locked the doors of my car when I saw the anger of the male driver behind me. He swore. He punched the steering wheel. He thrashed his head. He continued to call me everything under the sun.

I sat and shrugged inwardly (after I'd made sure my doors were locked). When the light turned green I took off at a safe pace with him sitting right on my tail. At his first opportunity he flung his vehicle into another lane and glared at me as he drove past in a blur.

I'm glad I'm not that wound up. How do people live like that?

What have you noticed about queue behaviour? What are your rules of engagement?

Queue etiquette - what to do when the machines don't work.

When I arrived at the train station this morning, it was about 8am - the heart of the peak at my tiny suburban train station.  I knew that I had to top up my myki at the machine because the balance was less than $5.

I'm very familiar with the machine and use it all the time to top up the card. When I arrived, the was no queue and I walked straight up to the machine.  I pressed all the usual buttons, inserted my debit card, selected my account type and then entered my PIN.  Nothing happened for a while and I looked again at the display on the EFTPOS part of the machine and saw it was asking me to re-enter my PIN.  I did what it asked and continued to wait.  In the meantime a queue of people had formed behind me.  I could hear a train arriving and was keen to be on it.

Nothing happened again.  I looked again and was asked to re-verify my PIN. The train came and went.   At this point I decided to pay with cash, rather than fruitlessly arguing with the machine further.  The woman directly behind me was becoming highly agitated.  I turned and apologised to her as I waited for the machine to acknowledge any form of my money.  She said, "Do you think I could just do my top up? I want to catch the train."

I found this bizarre.  I was also wanting to catch the train and was wrestling with a machine that usually works without a problem, if a little slowly.  We all just had to go through the process with the machine in turn.

The machine spat my note out.  As I turned it over and tried reinserting it, the woman behind me asked again if she could "just use the machine while you are waiting". Waiting? I was in the middle of using the machine!  I wasn't waiting.

My response was to say that we're all just wanting to use the machine so we can catch a train.  "We all just have to wait and take our turn."

She huffed again.  The machine finally accepted my money.  The myki was topped up.  As I walked away to wait on the platform to wait for a train.  I waited for less than two minutes.

We seem to be in such a hurry these days and expect everything to happen instantly that we take it out on other people when those expectations aren't met.  Wouldn't it be great if the woman could understand that everyone was in the same boat and find a way to help?

What do you do?  What's the etiquette in this kind of situation?

The longest line

Wandering through the Bourke Street Mall today after having a long lunch with two friends at the Richmond Hill Cafe and Larder (do try the Rodriguez Eggs) I had to break my way through  the long line of people waiting to look at the Myer Christmas windows.  Security guards were on hand should the band of toddlers and their harried parents form a fringe Occupy movement, but they did little to ensure entry and exit to the Myer department store itself.

I felt the pain of the people as I found a gap and excused myself through it.  I've written before about how my position in a queue marks the space for people to find a thoroughfare, even if I'm somewhere obscure, like the back corner.  They all looked so unhappy and bored as they stood in the line.  Deep down they must have known they were queuing to gain access to walk past some department store windows.  I don't get it, although standing in this kind of pointless line is good training for when they go to Spain and need to buy a train ticket to somewhere.

I travelled with a friend to Spain in 2003 (was it really that long ago?) and had a blast.  We travelled around for about six weeks starting in Barcelona and ending in Madrid after spending Easter week in Lisbon over in Portugal.  We'd been learning Spanish before we went and relied on the trusty Lonely Planet Spanish phrase book when we were lost for (Spanish) words.  We were planning our itinerary as we went and were having trouble finding somewhere to sleep anywhere in Spain during Easter week.  Easter is a very big deal in Spain and we discovered it's big in Portugal, but not as big.  We managed to find accommodation in an apartment within a big house in Lisbon so decided to catch the overnight train from Madrid to Lisbon.

Train travel in Europe is famous as the best way to get around.  What they don't tell you in the guide books is about the requirement to wait in long, slow, never ending lines.  And that at the end of these lines are surly unhelpful people who view you, the travelling public, as an unwelcome interruption to their endless cigarette smoking.

We decided to get the organisation of travel out of the way early and so made our way to Madrid's central train station.  We arrived mid morning and found it packed.  It was as if the whole of Europe was on the move and required to stop over in Madrid.  After some reconnaissance we realised there was a queuing system just like the one at the local deli - you take a paper ticket with a number and wait for your number to be called or come up on a screen.  We took a ticket and the number on it was something like 143.  We then looked at the screen and discovered that ticket number 43 was now being served!  That explained the large number of people hanging around.  Surely that couldn't be right!  It was.

It was time for some strategic decision-making.  Firstly, we needed to observe what was going on so we could work out how fast the queue was moving.  This was our first error.  We needed to observe how slowly the queue was moving.  The technical answer is it was moving very slowly, somewhere between the speed of continental drift and that ice shelf off Antarctica.  We decided to wait it out.  Perhaps other people would get tired of waiting and drop out of the queue.  We didn't want to miss our slot and end up having to come back another day or end up back at the end of the queue.

To pass the time, we found out all our possible travel options from Madrid to Lisbon, refined our choices and then practised asking for them in Spanish.  With the amount of time we ended up spending in that queue, I should have been more ambitious - I could have read "Don Quixote" in the original Spanish if only I'd shown some imagination and ambition.

The other thing we could do was watch the officials behind the ticket counter.  We became fixated on the man in the green jumper.  He looked impatient and unhelpful. Under no circumstances did we want to be served by him.  He also smoked at his ticket desk which contributed to long pauses in the service he offered; finding the next cigarette, taking it out of the packet, finding something to light it with, raising it to the lips, lighting the cigarette itself, inhaling and exhaling were all activities that required his undivided attention.  Was it any wonder the planet was warming faster than this queue was moving!

After about four hours, we became hysterical.  It was just too funny for words.  Perhaps we were on Spanish "Candid Camera" and a smarmy host would jump out at any moment and say in speedy, unintelligible Spanish that they'd never seen people prepared to wait so long in a queue!  And only to buy tickets to go to Portugal! Hilarious. Or maybe it would be the Australian Government using hidden cameras to gather footage to prove to the Australian public that the waiting times in a Centrelink office, or on hold to talk to Telstra, were nothing.  Nothing!

Our number came up and we jubilantly stood up and looked to see which counter bay to go to.  The only one free belonged to the man in the green jumper.  We could smell the sneer of his disapproval as we approached.  All the Spanish I'd ever learnt went out of my head and my heart started to pound.  I'd never be able to book these tickets.  We'd find ourselves in the middle of Russia before we knew it and I had even less Russian.  We'd be abandoned at a remote station somewhere in the Ural Mountains!

I took a breath and said hello.  The man in the green jumper grunted back and lit a cigarette.  I managed to get my first question out.  He looked at me, disgusted.  I had started with my standard conversation starter - "do you speak English?" Of  course he didn't.  He looked like he did really, but had smelt our fear and decided to be difficult.

I launched in with the request I'd been rehearsing for the past four hours.  As my communication became more deliberate (a slip of the tongue, an inflection the wrong way and who knew what I'd be saying?) he became more and more taciturn.  He glared at me as though my attempt at Spanish was an insult to all Spaniards.  My attempts to solicit information from him were met with silence or monosyllabic grunts.  At times he would laugh and joke with his colleagues and then turn back to us with his steely yet impatient stare.  He broke his silence only to shower me with rapid, detailed Spanish as he handed over the tickets.  I had no idea what he was saying to me and just hoped that the tickets were what we wanted.

It turns out that we did purchase tickets to Lisbon on the overnight train from Madrid.  We even managed to get seats in a non-smoking carriage.

I will never forget the man in the green jumper and the moment we realised that there were 100 people ahead of us in the queue. Come to think of it, that publicity footage could be very handy for the Government.

What's the longest line you've ever waited in?  What was it for?

The taxi queue.

Stupidly, I neglected to factor in a delayed arrival, Friday night and Christmas party season to my usual travel plans, so I found myself at the end of a taxi queue at 12:45am today.  These days when I travel to the airport, I use the very efficient and affordable Skybus and then catch a taxi home from there for a fraction of the cost of a taxi from the airport.

Usually I step straight off the bus and into a waiting cab at the rank right outside Southern Cross station.  Not last night/this morning.

I'd spent a couple of days in Perth on business and made it to the airport by the skin of my teeth (3 minutes until baggage check in closed).  The flight was delayed taking off and then was slower than usual due to a lack of wind or something, so I wasn't at the baggage carousel in Melbourne until after midnight.  I was like a zombie, my body clock not sure was going on after spending two nights on a schedule which was three hours behind my usual time zone.  This meant that I'd been awake since 5am Perth time.

Anyway, I had my return ticket for the Skybus and only needed to wait for a couple of minutes before one came along.  I managed to get a seat and twenty minutes later was walking out to the cab rank where there were about twelve people in front of me.  After fifteen minutes only one cab had pulled up. Drastic action was needed.  I started talking to people in the queue and discovered that quite a few of them had destinations within the CBD.  They were getting frustrated and the trams were still running so I gently suggested the tram as an alternative solution.  I managed to get eight (grateful) people out of the queue this way and was soon second in line.

The guy in front of me was making calls to see if he could get a friend to come and get him.  He said that I could have the next cab that arrived.

Behind me in the queue was a group of six people who looked to be in their sixties.  They had been out on the town - the men were in black tie and the women were wearing shiny things.  They were also carrying wine glasses and screaming for a maxi taxi.  They'd only been waiting for a short while when they started to hoot and wave at any passing vehicle that vaguely suggested it would be a suitable mode of transport for their merry crew.  In my exhausted state, they were too much for me.

At one point I noticed another man had joined the head of the queue and was standing there looking like he was trying to be inconspicuous.  He was plastered and was falling asleep on his feet.

"Mate, that's the wrong end of the queue," I said, choosing a friendly tone.

"What?" he replied in an equally friendly tone.  Good, he wasn't dangerous.

"You're standing at the front.  You need to go down the other end," I said pointing in the distance.  It was no longer possible to see the end of the queue.

"Nah," he said unconvincingly.

"Yes," I said firmly, smiling.

"I'd be better off walking."

"Probably."

And off he went.

Then a taxi appeared.  I pounced and called out to the queue my suburb to see if anyone wished to share the cab.  Two women were quite a way down the queue were going past my suburb.  They looked okay, so I agreed to share the cab with them.  They were very grateful, saying how lucky they were and they never would have thought to ask.

Hopefully they will ask next time and I'll be in the queue!

The driver said that it was a very busy night and he hates it when it's busy.  None of us could believe he would say such a thing.  He explained that on a night like this fights break out at unsupervised ranks and on the streets as people become more and more desperate to get a cab ride home.

Note to self, catch a cab from the airport during the Christmas party season!

Head on pillow and lights out at 2am.