Yes It’s True: I’ve often had problems waiting in line

“So come on kids, line up, sign and re-enlist today because we need more schooling for more students at Morescience High.” — Principal Poop speaking at a pep rally in the Firesign Theatre’s “Don’t Crush that Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliars.”

A holiday season visit to the Kalamazoo Air Zoo last month reminded me painfully that I have a terrible disliking for waiting in line.

Though the experience overall was pleasant, there was one 45-minute stretch in which I had to wait in line with other family members in order to enjoy a two-minute simulated exercise in space travel. It just doesn’t seem desirable — trading 45 minutes for two minutes.

Yet that’s the way it usually is when visiting Disney World, Six Flags or Cedar Point. You spend the vast majority of your time standing in line and then getting herded around like cattle before you get your two minutes of manufactured pleasure.

What’s even more astonishing is that many folks somehow consider this process as wonderful. They’re will to lay down big bucks to bring the kiddies and grandkiddies along to take part in these exercises.

I suppose some armchair psychiatrist would tell me that my aversion to standing in line has something to do with my tender youth, when I was lined up on three different occasions to be administered the polio vaccine in the 1950s. Today, I am grateful to Dr. Jonas Salk and his work for my having avoided the dread disease, which unfortunately afflicted several people I knew.

I also suppose that some of the most disturbing movie scenes I’ve ever seen involved people waiting in line to be executed by beheading, whether in medieval times or during the French Revolution. When you are lined up for such executions, you get to see the ghastly process ahead, you witness what’s in store for you.

I have noticed that one of the most common processes for children in schools is that they are lined up in orderly fashion for procession to class, to concerts or to do any kind of program. I suppose this is an effort to avoid the chaos of letting them run amok.

Then there are the lines on the highway when there are road repairs or emergency response to traffic crashes. But these days, we are told to act like a zipper when having to close ranks into one line, thereby allowing some clueless or arrogant wayward motorist to sneak ahead of us in line. From where I sit in may car, it is nothing less than permitting cuts in line.

So my negative feelings about lineups continue.