How to be Impatient - Part One

You are standing in a queue at a railway station waiting to buy a ticket. The train will leave soon. The person buying a ticket is fussing with their money, then asks for a timetable, and then asks the staff in the ticket-window which platform the train leaves from. When told ‘Platform 2', they ask ‘Where is Platform 2?’ If you feel mounting irritation at this point, you are, like me, one of the impatient.

Few people seem able to praise impatience; cultural superiority lies with the stolid, the patient, and the inert. Never mind that most innovations have occurred because some impatient person got sick of waiting. This all means that impatient people, like me, are an oppressed cultural minority: we need to use our wits to survive. This obviously requires a lengthy book of hints, of the kind that get sold in airport bookshops. Regard this text as Part One.

The main area in which impatience is experienced, at least in England, is on the roads. I drive a small sports car, and enjoy zipping along the open road. However, a more usual traffic experience is to be at the end of a queue of slower vehicles, tailing along behind a Nissan Micra (the underpowered car for underpowered people). This shows the terrible paradox of driving - that the slower the car, the more likely it is to be in the front of the traffic with an unimpeded view of the road ahead.

So there is not much advice I can give impatient drivers. However, I do have a handy hint regarding another area of impatience: which queue to join in the supermarket check-out. My advice, based on sustained observation and testing, is to choose the queue with the fewest women. There are two main reasons:

1. Women are nicer than men. Women are more prepared than men to regard the staff on the checkout as people, worthy of conversation. This takes time. They will also attempt to help the checkout staff by giving the exact change for their purchases. This involves carefully sorting through their money and counting it out. This also takes time, and contrasts with the male approach of dropping a banknote.

2. Women are more careful with their money than men. Most men keep their cash in their trouser or jacket pockets. Women, on the other hand, keep their cash in a series of containers, each inside the other. The purse (designed to be small and difficult to get fingers into) is kept inside a handbag, which is often inside a shopping bag. Any purchase is therefore preceded by a sequence of money-discovery, and followed by a reverse sequence of money-concealment.

To come later: hints on how to break the buffet queue.