Fats, Vitamins and Minerals

The long wait at the National Statistics Office yesterday allowed me to complete two rows of crochet - this is just the long screening queue (we got number 5,796 and number 4,000 was being served when we arrived). There was, of course another long queue for payment but it wasn’t possible to do any crochet work since we were moving from seat to seat as the line moved up.

It was in total over 4 hours waiting time, just to apply for an NSO-authenticated marriage certificate. In fairness, everything was rather orderly, and everyone worked really very hard.

By the time we finished the last stage of the process (payment), there was just a few people left and some of the NSO employees at the screening areas, mostly women, were preparing for their trip home - combing their hair, putting on make-up, etc. It was past 6PM when we finished. The women at the cashier looked really quite tired. Security personnel have started to relax and rest a bit.

I’m quite used to endless queues, something that the university was notoriously known for during registration of classes, at least way back in the mid-80s. I suspect things have greatly improved since a Computerized Registration System, was implemented some 15 or so years later.

The sight of everyone working really hard and working very courteously, and people in line defending the queue when someone tries to jump queue, makes all the waiting much easier to bear. In fact, it becomes a socially interesting experience.

Only in visa application queues at foreign embassies do I feel much revolt. The situation is very different — the people behind the counters work very slowly, almost deliberately slow, as the queues outside get bigger and more tense. The people behind the counters - protected by thick glass panels - also engage in their own special brand of harassment, a brand picked up from the colonial experience. Talking to people I have met in the queues, most of them are desperate to leave the country, and thus are at the mercy of the embassy staff.

So now the embassies employ means to make the harassment less visible (no more queues) and even more profitable (calling up a toll number for application appointments).

I guess queues are an effective way of keeping people too busy to think and question the systems which drive them to do the things that they do. So in this sense, queues aren’t really any different from the grind of the 9-5 work, whether sitting behind the desk or shuttling across town or country for meetings and conferences (one even gets paid for these sort of things).

The memory of my father sitting outside our house looking into the distance gives me a most melancholy feeling. It gives the same melancholy feeling when he looked at me for the last time, just a few hours before he died. It is like a rare glimpse into enlightenment, the only true existent state, when one has stepped out of the queue, the grind, the cyclic existence.

This is probably why “retirement” (stepping out of the queue) means to me a wonderful contemplation that busy and ambitious people can’t interpret outside of their attachments (such as income, ego, drive and motivation, career). Surely, I am becoming more and more in disagreement with others about the external sensible world…

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