Personal Space & Queues

Don’t you hate it when you are waiting in a line to be served and the person behind you invades your personal space? I had to buy some padding today for an upholstery project at home so I went to the only haberdashery chain store we have in Cairns. After searching for ages I found a roll of the required padding and lugged it to the counter for cutting. The staff in this store are very slow and inefficient, which is bad enough, but it got even worse when this barrel shaped woman with a walking stick parked herself behind me. She was wheezing and breathing all over me and tapping her metal tipped walking stick on the floor, so I edged forward slightly to give her some space, however she just moved up as close as possible to me as she could without actually touching me. I tried moving again and sure enough she was following and wasn’t going to give me any space. I silently cursed and endured this until it was my turn to be served, luckily the roll I had was just the right size so I quickly paid the correct cash amount and moved away. As I was leaving I heard the space invader rifling through her handbag for ages (which she could have done while she was waiting in the damn queue!) then she started demanding something with a pronounced eastern European accent. That was when I realised she was probably a professional queue stander from Russia or somewhere similar.