You ring the queue and an automatic voice tells you that they will call you back. There is also the return telephone queue, which I quite like. When your number is finally called you had better be there, on the correct spot, at the correct moment, or they will skip by you to the next person and your chance might very well disappear forever. This allows you to leave the premises and hang about just outside the door, peering through the window every few minutes in a concerned and suspicious manner. The ticket quite often will have a time estimate, showing how long you have to wait until it is your turn. If you find that there are several kinds of tickets, you should take one of each and, if you have any left over, you can use them to make friends on the way out, when they will be worth their weight in gold.
Upon entering a shop or financial institution of any kind, you should first locate the ticket machine there will be one, trust me. And when I say “ubiquitous” I mean all OVER the place. They do this with the aid of their ubiquitous ticket machines. However the Swedes have refined their queuing over the years, so that now they can queue without seeming to queue at all. There are queues everywhere, in places where you never suspected a queue would be necessary: bakeries, bike shops, cheese counters and, for all I know, churches and funeral parlours. I come from a country where a queue is, at best, a temporary storage location until it is time to charge into or onto something in the manner of a herd of cows escaping a paddock, so I do admire the Swedes and their steadfast belief in the power of orderly lines of individually numbered people.īut it has all gone a bit overboard, I’m afraid, and the Swedes have been used to queues dictating their lives for so long that they barely have the ability to function without them. If you come to Sweden, one of the first things you will notice are the queues, and the strange relationship of the average Swede to them.
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