Contrast in Queue Behavior: Part 1

I'm fascinated by the way people behave while they're waiting in line, or "in the queue", as our friends across the pond say. I'm fascinated because I'm frequently surprised. Consider the following experience I had today.

This morning, I decided to visit my local mall, in the hope of procuring an iPad 2. Fat chance. The line was pretty long, and they were expecting a small shipment. I had my Starbucks in hand, and I love a good "Apple line", so I decided to hang for 30, and see what popped. I settled for some line analysis.

The line was comprised of what has come to be recognized as the typical mix. There were a number of hipsters, and several stylish retirees. There was an industrious-looking teacher. New to the crowd were the miscellaneous Wall-mart types. Call me a snob, but do these people really need to own Apple gear? Can't they go back to buying Acer and Dell, and stop creating an underlying vibe of inexpert un-coolness in my community. I suppose it had to happen, now that Steve basically gives the equipment away.

One of these mouth-breathing dull normals soon piqued my attention, in a bad way. He walked up behind me, as I took my place in line. After taking a picture of the line with his current generation iPhone, he remarked to me that he didn't expect this long of a line. I agreed, noting that his shirt was quite wrinkled, and his breath smelled like stale wine. I would later note that his hair was uncombed, and his shoes were filthy. Awesome. Way to go out in public looking like you could care less about yourself.

I resolved not to talk to this guy. I was soon forced to do so, however, when he started telling the young mother and older gentleman in front of us about how easy it is to jailbreak your iPhone, and get "free apps from BitTorrent". Irresponsible. I refuted his claims, assuring these poor folks that while jailbreaking your phone may seem easy, you assume some risk by doing so. You have to take care not to run updates from Apple prior to a new jailbreak becoming available for the update. You have to defend against the security vulnerabilities that jailbreaking creates. The list goes on. The point is that this dork was making it sound like there's no downside to hacking these devices, even when Apple has stated repeatedly that they will void the warrantee if they suspect you've hacked the system in this way.

As the mouth-breather spewed his misinformation, he inched forward, along the side of the line. I moved up to, drawing closer to the person in front of me, in an effort to unobtrusively preserve my place in line. When he was roughly even with me, maybe a half step ahead, but clearly out of line, I asked if he got out of line because he decided not to make a purchase today. He promptly claimed that I pushed him out of line. I responded that I hadn't, and suggested that if he maintained his proper place in line, he'd have nothing to worry about. Everyone around us gave us amused looks, as he tried to act like he didn't know he was trying to cut.

We had another funny exchange, when I straight-up told him he as misinformed on the subject of brute force password attacks. When he asked me what business I was in, and I told him I'm in information security, a few of the people around us laughed. He shut up for good, then. I was tempted to taunt him by asking if he had any more nuggets of wisdom for me to debunk. In the end, I resolved to blog about it instead.

I'll post part two tomorrow. It's was a much more positive experience, one that inspires me when I think of it.