Susan Buckland: Be clued up on queuing

COMMENT

When asked if I have had a bad travel experience, queuing at Los Angeles International Airport sprang immediately to mind. Polite though they are, queues have a way of making blood boil. Especially at LAX, as this heaving hub of airline activity is called.

It used to be that you could sail through Immigration there with relative ease. But those were the pre-September 11, 2001 days. The extra security measures, necessary as they are, have turned queuing at LAX into part of the furniture.

Snake-shaped it is, curving in and out of those kit-set fences. Every now and then the officials dismantle them to let you out of one snake-pit into another. Traffic management, they call it.

Anyway, there I was, stuck in the jam and running short of patience. My flight had arrived at LAX at 9.10am. An hour and a quarter later I was still wedged with all the other unfortunates at the tail end of the snake.

There were other coils unwinding towards immigration desks further down the hall. I tossed up whether to abandon my queue for one with more momentum than a constipated snail. But I wasn't confident, given my track record of choosing the slowest queues in banks.

Stuff it. I was tired after the 11-hour flight. My queue was peppered with passengers that involved the immigration officers in lengthy interrogations. It was too excruciating. I decided to gamble on another queue.

The man behind me wished me luck. We had spent the previous hour cheering each other with stories about delayed flights and lost baggage.

It is always tempting to choose the shortest queue but I have been trapped like that in banks once too often. The flow slows to a trickle and then dries up while the person in front empties his life savings in coins on the teller counter.

I studied the immigration officers behind their booths. One looked particularly efficient, her queue had an even flow and I made my move. My previous queue companion made a victory sign as I progressed forward. Too soon.

With just one passenger between me and the booth a woman in a wheelchair appeared out of nowhere and steered confidently past us, brandishing plastic cards. She had travelled from South America and, at one point, became so agitated that she leapt out of her wheelchair and, standing erect, banged her cards down before the officer.

Uh-huh! Could this be an imaginative form of queue jumping? She wore a large, sequined beret which would have suited Nandor Tanczos but 20 minutes later her headgear had lost its fascination.

My companion from the other queue passed through Immigration while I had to wait another 10 painful minutes before Madam of Bountiful Beret wheeled on through, stuffing her cards triumphantly down an equally ample bosom.

Alas, the gods of seamless airport travel were not shining on me that day.

As I was about to put my foot over the white line, passport within millimetres of the immigration officer, she held up her hand.

The pause signal. Her system had gone down, she apologised in a cheerful voice. Don't worry, she continued brightly. It happens all the time. "Strewth," as my sister would say. So near and yet so far.

And you don't abandon one queue for another when you are at the front and promise still hangs in the air. I had been one of the first to step off the aircraft.

Two hours later, I was one of the last to move through Immigration. I rescued my suitcase which had been doing lonely revolutions on the carousel and headed outside. At least the Californian sun was shining.