I noticed the queue at the same time the two young men did. On the other side of the one-way road, lined with a mixture of high street and boutique shops, a line of people had formed. It was the only shop on the street with a queue in front of it. The two men coming towards me were young, not long out of their teens, and strutting confidently in that way that many young men do. They started to grin when they realised what the shoppers were lining up to purchase.
“Birkenstocks, wa?” one taunted loudly. They both laughed.
The people in the queue were not deterred. This is where we are, in the year of our lord 2021: willing to wait for practical cork sandals.
This willingness to wait has evolved over the past 18 months. I can’t help but think about the kinds of products that inspired people to spend their time in a queue p.C. (pre-COVID). Crowds seemed happy to stand around and await limited-edition sneakers, the latest tech releases, and strange hybrid pastries. Birkenstocks? Unlikely.
We used to be enraged and frustrated by waiting at the doctor’s office or for any government services. Yet, we were often mindlessly accepting of the patience needed to access de rigeur dining or the most in-demand objects. It’s a capitalist one-two punch. If time is money, then many queues demand that you pay twice for the product at the end of the line. The queue is also a mechanism of power; it controls the means of consumption and reinforces the passivity of our role within a consumer economy.
If time is money, then many queues demand that you pay twice for the product at the end of the line.
But what has happened lately to our willingness to wait? The passivity of waiting in a queue has paled next to the passivity of lockdown. The past months have necessitated patience - whether we’ve managed it virtuously or not.
The first pandemic queue I stood in was outside my local DM drugstore on one of the first lockdown days in March 2020. Just before 9:00 am when the shop opened, there were already around thirty people clustered around the doors. I counted again and again; the growing crowd viscerally represented how our collective anxiety was also building. Soon, there were the queues to get groceries, forced to take a shopping cart as part of the store’s capacity-monitoring structures. Here in Berlin, there were online queues as website servers were overwhelmed by freelancers in their hurry to apply for emergency financial aid.
All the waiting that we did at home was externalised in the ubiquitous queue. And the type of queue has become an informative signal about how we’re doing and what’s happening both politically and socially - a sort of pulse check. The queues to buy masks and hand sanitiser and toilet paper gave way to queues to get tested (before seemingly every small business in Berlin turned itself into a test centre to cash in on the government-funded distributed testing strategy1). For a while, my assumption of every queue I saw was that it culminated in a long q-tip jabbed up the nose. I’m curious if all of this waiting has strengthened our patience for the doctor’s office, the Bürgeramt, or the Ausländerbehörde (civic and immigration offices - those last two might be a stretch).
We’re still standing in queues, although some of them are again for restaurants, museums, and clubbing privileges. The most recent queue I waited in was two-fold: the applied queue of the vaccination priority rubric, which escorts us to our spot in line on the basis of job, age, or health and dictated for me my own willingness to wait; and the physical queue at the vaccination centre.2
This time, the passivity of the queue was transformed. The helplessness of being unprotected was arrested by a needle in the arm; it’s a different sort of consumption transaction. I walked out of the centre and the bus was waiting for me.
Unsolicited Recommendations
If you read one thing this week, make it Solmaz Sharif’s amazing political-poetic essay, The Near Transitive Properties of the Political and Poetical: Erasure.
I’ve only just started it, but (freshly minted Pulitzer Prize winner) Natalie Diaz’s poetry collection, Postcolonial Love Poem, has already won me over. Extra shout out to “They Don’t Love You Like I Love You” for reminding me of…
…the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, a band I loved as a teenager but haven’t listened to in years. Show Your Bones is back on repeat in my ears; I’m particularly into “Way Out”.
Questions to Ask while waiting.
There has been something wonderful about watching Berlin bars and clubs operate as test centres while we were in lockdown. I’m already a little sad that I can’t walk up anymore to the window at my neighbourhood bar, lean my head in, and have a young person swirl a cotton swab around my nasal cavity to confirm that I can go about the rest of my life, safely negative.
Another Berlin pandemic quirk: the vaccination centres operating in disused airports. There was one forgotten sign proclaiming that ‘duty-free purchases don’t count towards your baggage allowance’ as I waited for my shot. I still can’t decide if it was delightful or eerie.