Job Discussion Forums

[scot47]

One thing that does get to me - even after I have been coming here for years is the lack of queueing culture ("standing in line" to Gringos).

Bank clerks who will deal with three customers simultaneously and the local who marches in and goes straight to the head of the Queue. Some of the "Hindis" can be guilty of that but they are easier to intimidate !

[Cleopatra]

[007]

[scot47]

But my task here is to teach these people how to do things THE RIGHT WAY.

After I have taught them all to queue and take turns I shall work on them accepting the 39 Articles of the Church of England.

[007]

[Stephen Jones]

The worst are the Indians and the Pakistanis. One of the few pleasant things about changing planes at Riyadh is that after the pushing, shoving and banging the luggage trolley into you that you get from fellow passengers on the Colombo-Riyadh international flight, you then get to the domestic terminal where the nearly all Saudi passengers wait in a perfectly civilized queue.

When I take the plane to Lanka from Dammam, I have to suffer being pushed and having luggage trolleys banged into me from all the fellow passengers. Yet, when I take the return flight there are perfectly orderly queues at Colombo airport. One explanation is that the Indians who take the flight art not queuing at Colombo for the check-in, but it seems to me that either being in the Kingdom, or the prospect of leaving it, brings out the worst in them.

Whilst you are in danger of being trampled at the airport, if you go to a shop you are unlikely ever to be noticed by the mainly non-Saudi shop assistants. The disdain is of two types: the sullen disdain from the lowly paid who clearly don't get any financial benefit from making a sale, and the look of superiority from the more skilled sub-continental who views his status in the bank or other business as justification for ignoring you (as he does in his home country). When I got particularly annoyed at one specimen in a bank he said to me, "Where do you think you are? This is a bank not a fish market." "I know," I replied. "If it were a fish market, I'd have got served long ago."

[johnslat]

Dear Stephen,

"The worst are the Indians and the Pakistanis."

My nominee for that title is the Egyptians - especially the ones going back to Cairo with two or three trolleys of household goods purchased in Saudi.

Regards,
John

[Stephen Jones]

We clearly fly in different directions, John.

What the Egyptians were/are the worst for is booking multiple flights. I've stood at the back of a queue to see if I'd been bumped up the waiting list where I was number 325 to find that I got booked when I got to the counter. At least 315 of the people ahead of me had booked on other flights as well.

[eclectic]

Stephen you have a helluva lotta posts at 4049. Holy hat!

Johnslat I see is at 6400 or so. My measley or is it measly (and does that come from the word for the disease of measles?) 723 posts pales in comp..

[Stephen Jones]

Look at the number of years.

John had nearly three years in the middle off.

[veiledsentiments]

And all three of us have posts from the mid-90s up to this version of the board when we went back to zero. I passed Johnslat during his 3 years off, but he will likely catch me again.

VS

[johnslat]

Dear veiledsentiments,

Recall the sage advice of Satchel Paige:

"Don't look back. Something might be gaining on you."

What can I say - I'm a blabbermouth

Regards,
John

[scot47]

To the Ginger Feline

I was employing a figure of speech to indicate that attempts to teach queueing would be as futile as trying to convert the Mutawa'een to the Anglican Faith.

Perhapas johnslat can enlighten us as to which Figure of Speech I was using.
I was off the day we did that in High School.

[trapezius]

[007]

Uncle Scott, I think you were switching/diverting from a normal meaning to an ambiguous Zoomorphism!