Justice is, I think, the one thing all our souls hunger for most. Justice applied to other people, I mean. Especially Germans. We realize this on those rare occasions when we witness it in action.
I commute to work by car five days a week. On my drive, there is one spot on the freeway with an extra-long off ramp leading up to a bridge that is usually congested, meaning the cars on the off-ramp are backed up, sometimes for a mile, waiting to get off. And every day, some asshole jumps the line and merges into the off-ramp traffic at the very last moment, right at the end, where it veers off to go onto the bridge.
This requires you, usually, to slam on your brakes to avoid rearending them, and every week one sees glass on the road there, or sometimes even two smashed up cars where someone didn’t quite make it.
About once a month, you also see a police car parked on the emergency lane between where this offramp veers off, and the freeway. Watching for people taking cuts. Far too seldom, but whatever. They also have bankrobbers to catch I guess.
As an American, I learned only one thing in school: you don’t take cuts. Austrians don’t learn this lesson. They learn Latin instead. Europeans in general, except maybe the British, and even there I’m not sure, are not big on waiting their turn. Although, never having traveled much in Northern Europe, I might be leaving someone out, sorry if that’s the case.
I’ve also lived in Austria long enough to internalize the slight antagonism many people here feel towards their larger neighbor to the north. So when a BMW with German plates (Munich) took cuts right in front of me this morning, and I had to apply my brakes robustly to avoid an accident, I was doubly miffed. For some reason, though, I neither flashed my brights at him, nor availed myself of sign language. I just sighed and turned 9 Inch Nails up another notch.
Maybe it was the good karma points I earned by not reacting with anger; we’ll never know. But there was a policeman waiting on the emergency strip. And he flagged the BMW over. And he stopped me and when I rolled down my window, he asked, “Did that guy take cuts?” (actually, literally, he asked he in fine Austrian dialect “if that guy had pinched in front of” me). To which I could only nod, and say, “Oh, totally.”
I wanted to hug him.
Re the British taking cuts: no, not usually. But there’s a certain more-money-than-sense class who feel that people should just melt away in front of them, their needs being obviously more pressing.
And yet at the School Christmas Fair, in the line to Meet Santa, who would have thought *anyone* would cut in? But they did, right in front of me with their five-year-old.
-C’mon Callum (I’d like to point out to them at this point that Callum is not a name), lets go in front of this guy. I’m sure his kids won’t mind waiting an extra few minutes.
I bet the real Santa (not his helper, dressed up like him, who we met) is somewhere shaking his head, downsizing Callum’s stocking. When it should be the parents who suffer.
Swedes are kind of strange on the whole issue of keeping one’s place. I don’t have a car, so I haven’t really noticed if they cut or not in traffic, but I would suspect not.
But in other instances, they have engineered society so that in most situations, it is impossible to cut: instead of having queues, they have number systems where you take a little slip of paper with a number, used everywhere from the meat counter at the grocery store to the state liquor store to the immigration office to the ticket booths at the train station to the bank.
When Swedes do get in those rare situations where they actually have to queue up, they’re often not so good at it. Which is not to say that they cut in front of each other, they just don’t know how to go about making a nice organized line, so it easily turns into confusion about who is where.
There was an animated thing going around the Internet a few months ago, about the Italians vs the rest of the EU – how they drive, wait in line (or don’t) etc. 99% of it would have applied to Austrians as well, who someone once called Germans corrupted by their proximity to Italy. I like Austrians fine, but they have no familiarity with the concept of waiting one’s turn, waiting in line/queueing and you should see them at a buffet, wow.
yay! score one up for the good guys. this made me smile.
Although portuguese are really bad drivers (I got my drivers license here, S C A R Y!) they are pretty okay when it comes to queueueueues(sorry didn’t know when to stop)
There’s always one that tries it, but usually there is a policeman waiting at the end of the line… (I’ve seen one guy get turned back onto the highway, in the algarve, a detour of at least 50 kilometers)