Lining the queue

Photo by Luang­mai

Tonight after a work meet­ing, Naomi and I popped by the Hol­land Vil­lage Cold Stor­age because our fridge was bor­der­ing on empty. Because she was still suf­fer­ing from the pain of two pro­lapsed discs in her lower back, we were hop­ing to make this a quick gro­cery run, but for some strange man­age­r­ial rea­son, the super­mar­ket closes all but one of their check­out coun­ters at about 11pm, which also hap­pens to be one of the busier hours.

There must’ve been 20 peo­ple in the queue, and I was more or less resigned to stand­ing in line for a while. But Naomi, fresh from bar­gain­ing $10 off the price of our new laser printer yes­ter­day, wouldn’t stand for it (hur hur), and went to ask one of the check­out cashiers very nicely if she could reopen at least one other counter.

Bless that cashier that took one look at the line and agreed to reopen her counter.

Pleased as punch, Naomi came back to my line to tell me, and the rest of the line, that another counter had been reopened. And this is when some­thing really odd happened.

Only myself and two other peo­ple aban­doned the snaking queue to pay at the new counter. The 17 oth­ers remained where they were, per­haps happy and very con­tent with the fact that their queue was now 3 shorter.

Happy that she didn’t have to suf­fer at the super­mar­ket that long, Naomi later went online to help me with my work, and found out the fol­low­ing bits of infor­ma­tion that may con­sti­tute a pos­si­ble expla­na­tion to what hap­pened at the supermarket:

Sin­ga­pore holds the world record for the longest human domino chain;

The world domino top­ple record was set in Sin­ga­pore by a woman from China.

Yes. A lot to do with lin­ing up.

Link

Tech­no­rati Tags: sin­ga­pore, world records