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| Sunday, 09 April 2006 |
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That's Life...
I was never keen on science back in school. But it so happens that I firmly believe that certain things happen to you in life and they are so very baffling and thought provoking that you begin to wonder whether all this would've made sense had you paid a bit more attention to your science lessons back in school.
For example, try to recall the last time you had the opportunity to stand in a queue. I can almost hear you groan. Les, quite true. If it had been at the doctor's or so you will inevitably remember that the doctor took about half-an-hour each with everyone who went before you, but when it was your turn he wrote your prescription while looking down your throat and he told you how to take the tablets and the syrup while ringing the bell for the next person. And you wonder why the doctor doesn't even spend five minutes on you, whereas every other patient had much than that spent on him. And with time you will also learn that it is the same with any queue for you. Even if you are standing in line to pay an electricity bill, it seems that all the people who go before you apparently crack a few jokes with the cashier before telling him the latest gossip. Well, they must do something because they take enter-so long to leane the queue. Maybe it feels like this because they are showing some hideous programme on these overhanging televisions, something to do with how people in offices make use of their lunch breaks to be made fools of by mike toting television presenters who apparently believe that it's the height of coolness to talk both in Sinhala and in English, neither of them used grammatically, or even pleasantly. Oh and whenever you've been standing for hours in line, repeatedly prodded by that large, dangerous looking handbag carried by the person behind you, you will finally get to the front to be told that frizzy haired people should come in another line or something just as ridiculous. So off you'd go to join that line right at the back. General others will walk in through the door and come and talk to the person before you as if they were long last friends and the next thing you'll know, they'd all squeeze in after her, highly ignoramons to the fact that they've jumped the queue. Throughout all this the person who's handing out the forms you are waiting in line to receive will fulfill her duty with a law unto her own. She'll flick her air and adjust her saree after the retrieval of each form. And the stack of forms will be placed on a desk placed farway in a dark lonely corner. Now she can see the long queue, mind you. If not she wouldn't be able to walk to the table of forms without a white stick or a guide dog. But she'll appear surprised when a person leaving the queue will reveals the person standing behind her. Thus she will merrily take her own sweet time. And once more I wonder whether this is the birth science of queues. - Dilini Algama |
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