So here I was in a line back in 2021 with scores of others, all masked because of COVID, at a large airport when pent up tensions exploded. The reason? Well, one traveler broke protocol and ducked under the ropes that kept us in line and elbowed her way closer to the blue-clad TSA passport/boarding pass checkers. That’s when things quickly went south.

“Hey, lady, you can’t cut in front of all of us who’ve been waiting in line,” shouted a silver-haired gentleman standing behind me. A chorus of “yeah, you’re right,” “who do you think you are,” “you’re a jerk,” and barely audible expletives followed. Unmoved, the woman never looked back at all the angry eyes on her back and left us helplessly annoyed.

Again, that was four years ago.

But oddly, “lines” and the implicit messages that emanate from standing in line (“queuing up”) have been on my mind a lot lately. And when you add gender, cultural differences and one’s personal space preference (proxemics) into the mix, things can really get dicey.

Kinda weird, huh? Well, let me explain.

You see, near the end of my most recent column, “Why people vote against their self-interest,” I posed several pointed questions aimed purposefully and pointedly at men. And here it is over a week later and I remain intrigued about the realities of how lines permeate our daily life, sometimes in ways we’ve never considered. Here’s what I wrote:

“Why are lines with women waiting to get into restrooms in airports, convention centers, stadiums, etc., often twice and sometimes three or four times long as lines with men? And men, when you exit those restrooms what thoughts go through your mind when you look into the faces of those women you passed by on the way in? By comparison, what goes through your mind when you’re confronted by the undeniable realties these days of the horrific treatment of women?

Now unrelated to the aforementioned, my line intrigue was further deepened as I watched on TV a fist throwing throw down between two beefy men at a Walmart store that happened after one of them violated a “jumping in line” cultural no-no in the United States to get to the register. And more to the extreme, we’re left shaking our heads while watching the evening news and seeing road rage – and even shots fired – when someone jumps the line and cuts someone off on a busy highway.

So, let’s ponder the way lines are ingrained in our expectations, communications, consciousness and how they often manifest in our daily lives, shall we!

For starters, we cross lines, blur lines, ignore lines and challenge lines, don’t we?  “Line our pockets,” “line up our ducks” are common idioms frequently found in the way we communicate. Admit it or not, we draw a line when it comes to our personal space preferences and otherwise how we expect to be treated by others, do we not?

“Drawing a line in the sand,” is another idiom that appears frequently in Bob Woodward’s, “War,” a superbly written book about the leadup to the war between Russia and Ukraine, a metaphorical (sometimes literal) point beyond which no further advance from Russia would be tolerated. I’ll add that the president of the United States “drew a line in the sand” with threats to impose stiff tariffs on imports from India, Canada and other nations with a deadline of August 1st for non-compliance. 

Now to make this personal, I’ll share an example of a painful – literally- lesson I learned about drawing a line when I dared someone to cross a line. You see, decades ago I drew a line with a piece of chalk on a sidewalk in my neighborhood and dared an unfamiliar kid to cross it. Well, he took me up on my offer and punched me on my nose before speeding off on his bike. Yep, he gave this knucklehead a painful, eh, “knuckle sandwich” that’s burnished in his memory to this day.

Back to restroom lines, agree or not, long restroom lines for women versus shorter ones for men convey inequality. Now ask yourself if the roles were reversed how long do you figure men would put up with having to stand in long lines back-to-back with other men while women are in and out of much shorter lines smiling at those annoyed men? My answer? They wouldn’t!  You know it and I know it,

Switching gears, let’s take this lining up narrative outside the United States to see how it plays out in other countries.

During a brief stay in Barcelona, Spain years ago I located a post office nearby and went there to mail a package back home. On arrival I was taken aback by seeing that there were droves of people there either to pick up or mail packages but there were no lines. To the contrary there was lots of pushing and shoving and cutting each other off as folks jockeyed for position to get to the main desk. Unwilling to join in the fray (plus memories of that awful bloody nose administered to me back then) I decided that mailing that package wasn’t all that important after all.

Asked a researcher, does “waiting in line” need translation, or do all cultures view a wait as undesirable? It turns out there’re cultural nuances to queueing, according to the University of Virginia Professor Elliott N. Weiss and his colleagues. His team published observations from years of travel and research in “Line, Line, Everywhere a Line: Cultural Considerations for Waiting-Line Managers” in Business Horizons. (I ordered the publication to attach it to my passport for a trip to Argentina and Uruguay later this year).

Across the globe, the researchers confirm, people wait for food and transportation, to make purchases, to get services, or to have experiences. “But how they view the wait, what the “rules” are, and what they expect in terms of accommodations vary widely. In some countries, people expect to mill around, jockeying for position and clamoring for attention, while in others, finding chaos instead of an orderly queue would be off-putting.”

In the U.S., as pointed out at the outset of this column, the unspoken rules about lines are so strong that some react angrily to line-cutters. So, before you book your next flight abroad understand that neat, orderly lines and personal space preferences are not the norm everywhere; a lesson I learned after attempting to board a jam-packed train in Shanghai, where people self-advocated by pushing toward the front and even smiled at me as they muscled by me.

And once I was pushed – maybe shoved is a better word- from behind into that train, bodies were pressed against other bodies in a way that tested the effectiveness of my Listerine mouthwash, Old Spice deodorant and recently purchased cologne from a street vendor. 

Oh yes and of note, to deal with cultural differences in China and other places, Disney and other popular theme parks have created narrow, single-person queue lanes so that people could not cut ahead of each other.

In the end, if I were to suggest what I want you to conclude from and do about this global zig zag column on lines and lining up, that advice would be to exercise genuine curiosity, tolerance, patience – and above all common sense – as you learn and unlearn.

And remember this; coming from that years ago experience in my old neighborhood, a broken nose – or anything worse- just ain’t worth the hassle that can come with a trip to the local hospital (or funeral home), let alone the avoidable humiliation that can come with line protocol conundrums.

Trust me… and the nose on my face!

Terry Howard is an award-winning writer, a contributing writer with the Chattanooga News Chronicle, The American Diversity Report, The Douglas County Sentinel, Blackmarket.com, recipient of the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Leadership Award, and third place winner of the Georgia Press Award.