Is it a train, a plane? No, it's the guy from the back of the queue!

This is to be the first in a recurring series subtitled "Why Germany Drives Me F*#king Nuts!"

Now don't get me wrong, I like Germany, I wouldn't be living here if there wasn't something to keep me here. Of course, the ladies out there will be distraught to hear the main reason I am here is because of my girlfriend who has recently become my fiancée (apparently I'm the "fiancé" - different spellings, you learn something new every day!) But Germany has much more to offer primarily in the form of billions of litres of tasty tasty beer.

But I digest (bonus points for the person who can pinpoint that quote.) Back to this entries raison d'etre.

Queuing. Yes, you heard me right, queuing is THAT annoying in Germany that it deserves a blog entry. You've got to experience it to believe it.

It usually starts with queues that wrap around the whole store because there is only one till open (there is no German word for "service" folks!) Eventually a second till opens after customers get to the point of setting up temporary homes. And then the fabled call will ring out... another till has opened, and the rush starts.

All notions of human civilisation are abandoned as simply as you or I would exhale a lungful of carbon dioxide. Carl Lewis would be hard pressed to keep up with some of the cases I've seen.

I've been pushed and shoved more times than I can count by some moron trying as hard as he can to beat an 80 year old to the top of the new queue. Although more often that not the 80 year olds are first off the mark.

Last week I even had the privilege of witnessing a 20 something guy berating one of said old people. She had the audacity to move across in front of him even though she had been well ahead of him in the original queue. He started screaming in her face as if she was in the process of murdering his first-born.

Now, you may think I am making a mountain of a molehill but if you were living with this shit every time you went to the store you'd start getting mighty annoyed by it too.

And it's not just limited to the great-rush either. I was in C&A last week buying some t-shirts. There was one queue that split at the end for two tills. People kept just walking straight by the queue to the second till as if all of us in the first queue had simply lost our minds or just found the 45 year old woman working at the first till suddenly overpoweringly attractive.

To make it even worse/funnier they kept giving sneaky looks to the main queue to see if anyone was about to react. And that's what really killed me, nobody said a word. There were a few grumbles but nobody spoke up... you know, just in case it turned out to be Osama with a few kilos of C4 wrapped around him.

Of course it's not really the queuing that gets me, it the stupidity and lack of common courtesy of the twits who start pushing and shoving and running (and I can't stress that word "running" enough.)

You're probably asking yourself why I don't say something myself. Every so often I do, but it's hard to speak up in a language you are still in the process of learning, and anger doesn't usually lend itself to coherent speech even in your first language.

Still there is the beer, keep that in mind Ed, there is the beer!