Head East

There is something very basic about waiting your turn.  I remember all the way back to kindergarten when we would line up to to get into class, line up for our milk (Producer’s-Hoppy’s Favorite), line up to go out to recess, and line up to get back in when the bell rang.  Who can forget lining up for the drinking fountain while the kid in front of you pretends to drink, smacking his lips and making loud Ahhh sounds just to make you wait? There has to be a reason that waiting one’s turn is one of the very first things we are taught.

You can argue whether or not to pull over for fire trucks but the “no cuts” rule is internationally recognized as one of the basic tenets of civilized society.  It is set in stone.  “First come, first served” should be the motto on every country’s seal or coat of arms, and every sermon in every house of worship on every Sunday should include a reference to Queuing Theory.  

Waiting your turn as logical as red means stop and green means go (which may be logical in two ways).  I’ll bet that more people know that you should wait your turn for things than know how to swim or remember to set their clocks for daylight savings time.  It’s ingrained, it’s more than habit, it’s in our DNA, the same as fight or flight, and The Buffalo Bills will never win the Super Bowl.  

So is it any wonder that the very fabric of the universe seems to be rent asunder when someone does the opposite?  When a person cuts to the front of the line, whether we are queued up for clean water in an earthquake ravaged country or for a free sample of cheese at Costco, we can conceive of no punishment too severe.  

Cut the line to the movies?  Off with his head!

Slip to the front in the grocery line?  Tar and feathers!

Crowd ahead in a restaurant?  Forced listening to the entire Yoko Ono discography.

It is a known fact that line-cutters throughout history have caused immeasurable suffering; Hitler’s tanks cutting around traffic on the Bzura Turnpike in 1939, Captain Smith zooming past other ships to see who could get to the Atlantic ice fields first in April of 1912, and Angelina Jolie being fast-tracked past better movie ideas to create Maleficent just last year.  Seriously, have you seen it?

 

On Monday, March 9th there was a robbery in San Francisco.  The alleged perpetrator, hoping to avoid apprehension, escaped down the BART tunnels.  Not the best escape plan when you consider that the third rail has about a 1.21 gigawatts of electricity in it. This shut down the BART in all directions like someone flipped a switch.  We arrived at our station to head home at 5:20, but we didn’t get on a train until 7:00.  But delays are just part of the system and don’t happen, at least not like this, every day.  We chatted with other riders, looked at our smartphones, and generally waited our turn. Except for this one guy.

With about 60 or so people lined up for each door, one guy milled around the front of the line, pretending to be listening to the official announcements.  Then when a Fremont train finally showed up, he slipped in ahead of everyone.  To make it worse he was an “Upstreamer.”  Upstreamers are riders who get on BART going in the opposite direction they want to go.  They leave a crowded station and get off at less crowded one.  Then they cross the platform for a train heading the direction they want to go that is also less crowded, hoping to get a seat.  This usually works, except when all stations are crowded like on Monday.

So Upstreamer MaGee, I’m pretty sure that was his name, got on that Fremont train and was gone, heading east before those of us either too far back in line for the Fremont train, or waiting for one also going east, but to another destination could board.  When the Pittsburg / Bay Point train showed up, we crowded in among the end of the workday armpits and those guys in spandex biker shorts.  It moved very slowly and at each station had to stop to let people off, where more people squeezed on.  

Seven stops down the line, at an outside station, there were still so many people on the train that some of us had to step out to allow those who wanted to to disembark.  When who should appear to my wondering eyes but Upstreamer MaGee.  He had jumped on the Fremont train just to get outside in the fresh air and now here he was getting on a Pittsburg train, my train.  Technically he was still crowding ahead of all those people behind us and since he was now getting on my train, he was actually crowding ahead of me, albeit just by a few feet.  I wanted to call him out, I really, really wanted to.  But I held my tongue.  This is until a couple of stops later when that tongue was released like a South Carolina Confederate doing the rebel yell.  

When we stopped at that station I, along with Mr. MaGee, stepped off the train momentarily to allow offboarding passengers to...offboard.  As I returned to my spot on the train, I guess I was going too slow and he said, in a shrill voice like a panicked 17th century French nobleman when he finds a tear in his bicycle shorts, something along the lines of, “You must let me back on the train!”  

I said, “I am.  Just wait a second.”  Once on the train the Confederate tongue-wagger in me couldn’t hold back.  Standing just a foot or so behind his head, I said in a loud and booming voice, “I can’t believe the guy who cut in line at Civic Center gave me shit about getting back on the train too slowly.”  He never turned around. Childish I know.  But oh so satisfying.

When he left the train for good I never noticed.  I wanted him to take a parting shot at me and had several sharp retorts in my quiver, but he slunk away.  Of the quips I had prepared, I think, “Enjoy smoking turds in purgatory” may be my favorite.