NaBloPoMo: one post every day throughout November

Look at this. I took it after standing in that for an hour. Doesn’t look too bad from high up but at ground level you could really feel that there were loads of us. I thought it was a wonderful example of the strange Singaporean blend of practicality and total uselessness.

This was the queue to collect a race pack for the upcoming Great Eastern Women’s Run. They are still queuing as I type. Can you see how well organised the line was? Probably not from where you are, but it was a masterpiece of static choreography. We had to start in the dark corner on the far left and then we were steered to a spot by the basement escalator, still on the left. A pause in front of the main doors to let the queue on the other side deplete and then we moved over to the right of the main doors before finally crossing over to the red carpet, where we snaked up to the tills, and that’s where it got silly:

More than 15,000 entrants were bargained for, said the website, with three days to collect the kit between the hours of 11am and 7pm. So let’s call that 5000 people per day. So 5000 people / 8 hours = 625 per hour. And I counted, well, about 12 tills. So 625 people / 12 tills = 52 people per till per hour. It wasn’t going to happen, was it? By the time they’d Twitted to ask us to stop arriving until after the lunchtime rush, we were all embedded in exactly that.

I’m making a specific point here. I’m not simply complaining about being stuck in a long queue: we’ve all had that. Or the fact that there weren’t enough tills: oversight, so what? I’m talking about the fact that a portion of the event was so expertly arranged (men steered you through every section, it was like a ballet), only to fall flat at the final hurdle because half the planning was pants (‘rubbish’ in colloquial English).

It didn’t really matter because the queue was slowly moving all the time so you never felt stuck, and there was a sweet old lady handing out gerberas, which was our wedding flower, so that was nice. I just thought it was a great example of how, OverHere, you often get that infuriating blend of Logic + Nonsense. I guess you could say there are examples of it all around the globe, but I do think it happens a lot in Sing.